Fu is for good fortune
I found this coin quite a while ago in a Salem bead shop, it has peaches and bats on one side and the symbol for fu on the other (along with three symbols that I don’t know.)
The coin itself is made from cheap mixed metal and has a nice fake patina. The bats are also foo (the pun of good fortune ‘fu’ and bat ‘foo’ are associated.)
If anyone has any information what the peaches and remaining three symbols mean I’d love to know.
July 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Top: 福 - [fú] blessing, good fortune.
Right: 泉 - [quán] spring or coin as in 货泉 Huo Quan (Wealth/Money Coin), 布泉 Bu Quan (Spade Coin), 大泉五百 Da Quan Wu Bai (Large Coin Five Hundred), 大泉二千 Da Quan Er Qian (Large Coin, Two Thousand) and 大泉五千 Da Quan Wu Qian (Large Coin, Five Thousand).
Bottom: I know the 1st radical of the bottom symbol means woman/girl or something feminine like the Han Character (姑) which means father’s sister (aunt) or husband’s mother (mother-in-law). But the pair “女口” is unknown to me and to the unicode/utf-8.
Left: Could not find it yet, has many strokes to compare to a lot of symbols.
Sources:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A7%91
http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html
http://home.netvigator.com/~ykleungn/mingmang.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_coins