Introduction
The subject of this paper is nominally a Chinese silver one dollar (yuan 圓) coin, minted in 1928 and issued in Guizhou province, southwest China. This was the first coin in the world to feature a motor car in its design, and the only car-themed coin until the 1980s.Footnote 2 As well as introducing the coin itself, along the way this paper will touch upon a number of other topics, including: road construction in China, the car industry, and the building of the country's future through “reconstruction” as proposed by Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian) 孫逸仙 (1866–1925). The four central characters in the story that results from this are an eclectic assortment of people: Sun Yat-sen—“Father of Modern China”; Henry Ford (1863–1947)—industrialist and car manufacturer; Zhou Xicheng 周西成 (1893–1929)—Governor of Guizhou Province in the late 1920s; and Oliver Julian Todd (1899–1973)—engineer and collector of Chinese ancient bronze mirrors.
In the decades since the “Guizhou Auto Dollar” was minted, relatively little has been written about its history and background. This is despite the fact that the coin is well-known among numismatists and coin collectors and has enjoyed widespread popularity in these circles. By 1933, just five years after it first appeared, the coin had already become scarce and was being sought after by collectors worldwide. Despite its popularity the scant information found in the Hong Kong published A History of Chinese Currency is typical of most textual sources:
“The coin was minted to celebrate the completion of the Guizhou provincial highway in the 17th year of the Republic (1928) when warlord Zhou Xicheng was governor”.Footnote 3
What is most distinctive about this coin is that in place of the face of a leading dignitary—as found on most coins of the period—a depiction of a car of 1920s manufacture can be seen; hence the names given to it in Chinese: Qiche qian 汽車錢 (Automobile Coin), or Guizhou qiche bi 貴州汽車幣 (Guizhou Car Coin), Footnote 4 and in English: the “Motor Dollar”, or “Auto Dollar” (plus a host of variants in both languages).Footnote 5
In the available modern sources, apart from physical descriptions of the coin itself, additional information as to its background is more often than not conjectural. A notable exception to this is a 1992 article by Qian Cunhao 钱存浩, which will be introduced later in this paper.
Background
This is not the place to recount the entire history of silver coinage in China, but, nevertheless, some historical background will be necessary in order to put the coin into context. According to a 1933 English-language magazine article, Zhou Xicheng, Governor of Guizhou from 1926–1928, had originally considered having a depiction of his own head struck on the coin in the same way as Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) had done before him, but, as we shall see in due course, he thought better of it.Footnote 6
Late nineteenth-century examples of the Guizhou silver dollar, in common with those from other provinces, had shown coiled dragons, or similar symbolic designs;Footnote 7 it was only after the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 that the heads of Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shikai and others began to appear regularly on Chinese coins nationwide.Footnote 8
Sun Yat-sen's profile first appeared on a coin in 1912 to commemorate the founding of the Republic of China that year, and was minted in Nanjing in both silver and copper. Thereafter, coins were produced to mark important events in the lives of provincial governors throughout the early Republican Period and the corresponding Warlord Period (1916–1927), variously in copper, silver, and gold, and often as commemorative souvenirs rather than for circulation. A coin with the head of Li Yuanhong 黎元洪 (1864–1928), was minted at the Wuchang mint in the first year of the Republic, following his (initially somewhat reluctant) part in the October uprising that resulted in the Xinhai revolution - the event that finally brought to an end centuries of imperial rule. In 1915, a silver coin from the then remote province of Yunnan, was minted by Tang Jiyao 唐繼堯 (1883–1927) and gold and copper coins followed.Footnote 9 Also in the early years of the Republic, Lu Rongting 陸榮廷 (1859–1928), Guangxi Military Governor and a member of the Old Guangxi Clique, had a gold coin minted when he assumed office in 1916. In the 1920s many more figures in competing military and political cliques chose to raise their personal profiles in this way. In 1924 Duan Qirui 段祺瑞 (1865–1936), founder of the Anhui Clique, had a commemorative coin struck in Tianjin to commemorate his appointment as “Chief Executive” of the nation, and in the previous year, also in Tianjin, a fierce rival in the Zhili Clique Cao Kun 曹錕 (1862–1938) had silver and gold commemorative coins struck to mark his assumption of the presidency.
1928, the year in which the Auto Dollar was issued, was the year that the Nationalist Government finally established itself in its new capital of Nanjing, following the Northern Expedition, a military campaign that was specifically designed to bring regional warlords, such as those listed above, under the control of a centralised government. A 1926 coin from the Tianjin mint, which demonstrates the continued practice of displaying the image of warlords on coins right up to the time of the Northern Expedition, shows the head of Zhang Zuolin 張作霖 (1875–1928)—leader of the Fengtian Clique and major political figure of the time. Bearing in mind the sticky end to which many of these warlords came, it might be reasonable to suppose that when it came to Zhou Xicheng's turn, he would shy away from having his own head appear on a coin.
According to one source, Zhou had initially deferred this honour to his “nominal chieftain” Yuan Zuming 袁組銘 (1889–1927) who declined for reasons unknown.Footnote 10 Shortly afterwards, Yuan was killed by the Nationalists “for alleged treachery” to their cause,Footnote 11 so it can be seen that the most likely explanation for Zhou's reticence to have his head appear on the coin was indeed to disassociate himself from other warlords, and from Yuan Zuming—his former mentor and commander—so as to plant himself firmly within the ranks of those who supported the new Nanjing government. On the death of Yuan Zuming, who had effectively been “military governor” of Guizhou, Zhou Xicheng—then the province's “civil governor” (perhaps incongruously, with his thousands strong army)—raised the Nationalist flag and, according to Todd, changed the title of his post to “Chairman of the Governing Committee” of the province.Footnote 12 In fact, by June 1927, the year of Yuan's death, Zhou had officially become “Chairman of the Guizhou Provincial Government and Commander of the Twenty-fifth Army of the Republican Revolutionary Army”,Footnote 13 but by 1929—just months after the Nationalist government was installed in Nanjing and the Northern Expedition had finally come to an end—he had indeed adopted the less militaristic title of “Committee Member and Chairman of the Guizhou Provincial Government”.Footnote 14
A letter from Sun Yat-sen to Henry Ford
Sun Yat-sen, who had held the position of Provisional President of the Chinese Republic after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, and was to continue as a leading political figure before his untimely death in 1925, plays a central role in this story, as it was his interest in road building and the car industry—as part of his plans for China's development—that is likely to have been a central motivation for the minting of this provincial coin.
At the time of the revolution of 1911 Sun was famously raising funds in the USA to help in the overthrow of the Manchu ruling dynasty, and it was while he was in Denver that he heard of its demise. At this early date—before the aftermath of the revolution could have been foreseen—plans for road building as part of China's “reconstruction” had not yet even been considered. On his fundraising tour Sun Yat-sen had also been due to visit Detroit, already a centre of the US car industry, and the town where Henry Ford had established his factories, but Sun would not have been in a position to approach Ford on this, or any other matter, as news of the Chinese Revolution—for which he acted as figurehead—cut his fundraising tour short, well before he was able to complete his planned itinerary.Footnote 15
A letter from Sun Yat-sen to Henry Ford—sent from the seat of Sun's short-lived Canton Government in 1924—shows both Sun's admiration for the American as a businessman, and the importance he attached to both road building and the motor industry in his plans for the development of the Republic of China. Sun's letter to Ford was written in 1924—thirteen years after the Xinhai Revolution and just one year before his death through illness:
“…I know and I have read your remarkable work in America. And I think that you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale. In a sense it may be said that your work in America has been more individual and personal, whereas here in China you would have an opportunity to express and embody your mind and ideals in the enduring form of a new industrial system”.
I am of the view that China may be the cause of the next World War if she remains economically undeveloped and thus become an object of exploitation and international strife on the part of the Great Powers. For this reason I began, as soon as the Armistice was signed in Europe, to think out a plan for the international development of China with a view to its consideration by the Powers at the Peace Conference in 1919. This plan has since been worked out in my book, “The International Development of China”, which was published in Shanghai in 1921 [preface dated July 20th 1920] and in New York in 1922 by Messrs. Putman's Sons.
I now realise that it is more or less hopeless to expect much from the present Governments of the Powers. There is much more hope, in my opinion, from a dynamic worker like yourself; and this is why I invite you to visit us in South China in order to study, at first hand, what is undoubtedly one of the greatest problems of the Twentieth Century”.Footnote 16
The book mentioned here by Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China, includes a short but telling entry on road building that is also worth quoting:
“…If we wish to move quickly and do more work, we must adopt the motor car as a vehicle. But before we can use the motor car, we have to build our roads. In the preliminary part of this international Development Scheme, I proposed to construct one million miles of roads”.Footnote 17
What follows is significant with regard to the actions of Zhou Xicheng, Governor of Guizhou, just a few years later:
“These [roads] should be apportioned to the ratio of population in each district for construction. In the eighteen provinces of China proper, there are nearly 2,000 hsiens [xian or “counties”]. If all parts of China are to adopt the hsiens administration, there will be nearly 4,000 hsiens in all. Thus the construction of roads for each hsien will be on an average of 250 miles. But some of the hsiens have more people and some have less. If we divide the million miles of roads by the four hundred million people, we shall have one mile to every hundred. For one hundred people to build one mile of road is not a very difficult task to accomplish. If my scheme of making road-building as a condition for granting local autonomy is adopted by the nation, we shall see one million miles of road built in a very short time as if by a magic wand”.Footnote 18
Sun goes on to talk about the importance of the manufacture of cars and the supply of cheap fuel, which would become readily available to all who desired them:
“…cars, if turned out on a large scale, can be made much cheaper than at present, so that everybody who wishes it, may have one”.Footnote 19
Such widespread availability was of course Henry Ford's aim with his production of cars for the US market, but would certainly not have been a possibility in China's still far from egalitarian society. Although there appear to be no records to show whether or not Ford ever responded to Sun Yat-sen's letter, earlier in the same year Ford had hosted a visit by Chang Chien 張謙 (Zhang Qian (1888-?), China's then Trade Commissioner, who gave a speech to a group of Chinese trainees at the Ford, Highland Park plant in Michigan that was duly reported in the Ford company magazine Ford News of March 1924—three months before Sun's letter to Ford was written. In his speech Zhang gave an equally exaggerated account of the prospects of China's future car market, pre-echoing the ideas that Sun Yat-sen would later express in his letter, by suggesting that over one hundred million cars would eventually be required to supply China's four hundred million people.Footnote 20
Zhou Xicheng and O. J. Todd: road building in Guizhou
Having looked briefly at the road building dreams of Sun Yat-sen we turn once again to Zhou Xicheng, Governor of Guizhou, and his part in the building of roads in that province—a project which had begun in June 1926 with his establishment of the “Guizhou Provincial Government Bureau for Roads”.Footnote 21 In a 1985 study of the history of road building in China, Lin Xin suggests that there were three main reasons why, in the late 1920s, the Governor of Guizhou should have wanted to build roads in his province.
1. To keep up with neighbouring provinces that had already built roads some years before.
2. For the purposes of strengthening his political and military power.
3. To increase his personal prestige and leave his mark for generations to come.Footnote 22
To these reasons might be added Zhou's real need to establish his position, and that of Guizhou, in the new order, following the clamp down on regional warlords and the founding of the government in Nanjing.
A rather different take on this can be found in the writings of the American Engineer Oliver Julian Todd. Todd is central to the story of road building in Guizhou and in many other parts of China during the 1920s. We are fortunate that his colleagues seem to have thought highly of his work, as, in 1938, his writings were collected together in a book entitled Two Decades in China and published by the Association of Chinese and American Engineers in Beijing.Footnote 23 The essays had originally appeared in various engineering magazines as well as in popular publications such as the American magazine Asia and the Shanghai published English-language journal The China Weekly Review. The collection was reprinted in Taiwan in 1971.Footnote 24
During his time in China Todd supervised the construction of three thousand miles of roads in fourteen different provinces, and was responsible for several largescale projects aimed at taming China's rivers to halt the perennial flooding that was a major contributing factor to frequent famine in China.Footnote 25 Todd worked for the China International Famine Relief CommissionFootnote 26 and had been invited to Guizhou by Zhou Xicheng who at the time held the post of Honorary Chairman of the Guizhou committee for that organisation.Footnote 27
By this time Todd had been involved in road building in China for many years, and as far back as 1920 had been closely associated with the charitable organisation, the National Good Roads Association of China—more popularly known as the “Good Roads Movement”.Footnote 28 Thomas J. Campanella has suggested that it is likely that Todd had American commercial interests in mind with the construction of the roads, on top of any humanitarian aims that would benefit the local populous.Footnote 29 This may indeed be the case, but it should be understood that on a number of occasions in his writings Todd expresses his thoughts on the matter of famine relief, which do not immediately appear to support such profit-led motives. He claimed that “…the food problem of China has made the question of transportation a most vital one”Footnote 30 and with this in mind considered the question of roads in China to be “…one of the most vital ones for the present generation of engineers”.Footnote 31 Todd may have seen these projects as something that would be of mutual benefit to both China and AmericaFootnote 32 but as further stated by him, “…it is from a humanitarian aspect that the Famine Commission is interested in this work and it is making famine prevention its main program here as in other provinces in China. The opening up of more motor roads seems to be the soundest use of funds, for the present”.Footnote 33
Specifically with Guizhou in mind Todd realised that without roads or railways the province would be bound to self-sufficiency and as a consequence would “have practically no trade with the outside world”. When Todd went to view the road building work in Guizhou, which had been carried out under the auspices of the Famine Relief Commission, he found that over a thousand soldiers and famine refugees were working on it. Zhou Xicheng had even organised school children over the age of fourteen, of both sexes, to assist on the building of roads; the boys and girls taking it turns to do a week's work at a time. Todd's description on his arrival tells of a thousand school girls who had been “marched there for the short exercises that were to precede their initiation into activities such as schoolgirls the world over, perhaps, had ever dreamed of”.Footnote 34
Todd described his 1926 journey to Guizhou and the greeting he received on the Yunnan side of the border by one of Zhou's representatives and the “happy surprise” he felt when, still several miles from the capital Guiyang, he had been met by Zhou Xicheng in his newly acquired “seven-seater American automobile”.Footnote 35 Zhou's car, the very first car in the province, when mentioned in English-language sources, is always described rather generally as, an “American automobile”. Although several photographs of the car do exist it has not been possible to identify the manufacture of the car by looking at them—it would be nice to think that it was a product of the Ford factory, but it could equally well have been any one of a number of American cars. A representative of Ford Motors, “a titled British gentleman”, did in fact visit Guiyang in an effort to promote the company's cars but this appears to have been well after Zhou had acquired his own beloved vehicle. This visit, for which the sales representative was compelled to travel “through bandit-infested Yunnan”, prompted an anonymous newspaper reporter to suggest that “the ubiquitous Ford will soon appear in Kueichow”Footnote 36 and in fact, even by the time of the writing of that article in 1928, sixteen other cars had been reported to be on order for the province.Footnote 37 Whether or not these were products of Henry Ford's factories is unknown, but they are most likely to have been American. During the late 1920s it was American cars that dominated the Chinese market, providing 95% of those exported to North China, and 75% of those to Shanghai.Footnote 38
To Todd, being met by a car in such a remote province, was clearly a thrill:
“It is difficult for one in Peking, Shanghai, or New York to realize just what that means—an automobile in the heart of Kweichow [Guizhou]!”Footnote 39
We learn from a number of sources that this car had arrived in the mountain-locked province—described by Todd as “probably the most isolated province in the country”Footnote 40—not, of course, by road or rail, but in parts, on bamboo carrying litters, having travelled the fifty-day journey from Guangzhou over the mountains when the option of travelling by river had ended.Footnote 41 Todd's arrival in Guizhou, in the company of his wife, on 9 September 1926, is described by him in some detail:
“[Todd was greeted by] the governor and his full staff just outside the city in the first automobile that had ever been brought into the province. The governor appeared in white uniform with gold-ornamented sword. His whole local army of 10,000 men stood at attention. Officers saluted. No visiting potentates could have been more highly honoured. The gold braid on the uniforms of the brass band alone shone, and the strains of ‘The Red, White and Blue’ and ‘Swanee River’ filled the air”.Footnote 42
At this time, an American-style military band would have been as unusual as a car in this remote province, and Todd tells us that the “bandmaster had been sent to America for his training at the governor's personal expense”. At the ceremony in his honour, no doubt still to the accompaniment of Sousa and Gershwin, Todd was given a large gold medal specially struck for the occasion in recognition of his help in connection with the project. On seeing the work carried out by the soldiers, refugees and school children, Todd gushed:
“I was convinced that the people of this province, led by their governor, meant business and a new day was dawning in this part of China. They really had the ‘good roads bug’”.Footnote 43
Todd's mirrors
O. J. Todd is known in archaeological and museological circles as a collector of Chinese bronze mirrors. Although Todd does not mention it himself in his writings, one of the bi-products of both road and rail construction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the uncovering of new archaeological sites.Footnote 44 This situation met the interest of foreign collectors in their thirst for the acquisition of grave goods—objects that had been buried with persons of noble rank to accompany them in the afterlife—an area of collecting in which Chinese collectors were not widely involved at this time.Footnote 45 In the 1935 catalogue of his collection of Chinese Bronze Mirrors—examples of such grave goods—Todd himself mentions that he usually purchased them in areas far from the metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, as he understandably thought that examples acquired outside these commercialised areas would be less likely to have been forged or faked.Footnote 46 Contrary to standard archaeological practice, possibly because they were bought from third-party dealers, no indication is given in the catalogue as to where each mirror was unearthed, although, in the introduction to the book it is noted that most were purchased in the provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Henan. Historically, Han-dynasty-style mirrors are known to have been unearthed in Guizhou,Footnote 47 albeit in fewer numbers than in more northerly provinces, but it seems from his catalogue that none were purchased by Todd during the time he was there. Todd's collection of bronze mirrors can be seen in the “Oliver Todd Memorial Collection” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Zhou Xicheng's plans for Guiyang City
For many years there has been some controversy as to where the Guizhou Auto Dollar was minted, some suggesting that it was most likely produced in neighbouring Sichuan province where there was already an established mint.Footnote 48 This has been refuted by Qian Cunhao who through his research was able to identify the actual location of the mint in Guizhou.Footnote 49 The original Guizhou mint, which preceded the later institution by two hundred years, was established in 1730, and produced coins until the time of the Guangxu Emperor (r.1874/5–1908). The scant information available in the secondary sources as to the subsequent history of the mint, has led to much uncertainty—largely because it was commonly thought that there was no mint in Guizhou at the time the Auto Dollar was produced.Footnote 50 Nevertheless, even from the writings of O. J. Todd in the 1920s, it can be seen that Governor Zhou Xicheng certainly had plans for the construction of a local mint as part of his grand scheme for the modernisation of Guiyang, capital of Guizhou.Footnote 51 Decades later Qian Cunhao was able to convincingly show that the planned mint did come into being, and was indeed the very same factory that produced the Auto Dollar. In his article, relying heavily on documentary sources, but principally on eye-witness accounts, Qian sets out to challenge the assumptions of many previous authors, showing that Zhou Xicheng's plans for a mint did indeed come to fruition (albeit not as a full-scale facility), and persuasively demonstrating that the Auto Dollar was minted using the machinery and facilities of Zhou's recently established arsenal under the supervision of specialist technicians brought in from Sichuan.Footnote 52
Zhou Xicheng had great plans for the improvement of the city of Guiyang and despite the charge that he was building roads for personal gain, as suggested by Lin Xin, it was not only with road construction and the minting of a coin that Zhou sought to raise the profile of Guiyang. In the January 1929 issue of Asia it is reported that during the previous year Zhou had made improvements to the town—which would indeed have been of benefit to him, but would also no doubt have contributed greatly to the development of the province in general. These included: carrying out street improvements, providing a water supply system, and the building of a cement plant.Footnote 53 Zhou was also responsible for the supply of electricity to the Guiyang yamen, which was part of a larger street lighting and electricity project, and this was to be recognised as one of his major achievements.Footnote 54 Other projects, perhaps less humanitarian in their aim, include the establishment of the Guizhou arsenal, and the commissioning of a type of rifle that took his name—the Xicheng shi buqiang 西成式步槍 (Xicheng-type rifle). It was the very existence of this arsenal, and the machinery that was already available there, that made the minting of the Auto Dollar possible.
Zhou carries out the wishes of Sun Yat-sen
Zhou was widely recognised as a strong military leader and it was his ruthless nature as a former “bandit chief” that apparently allowed for the transition of the province, in just two years, from “a state of disruption into comparative order and calm”.Footnote 55
Remembering the dreams of Sun Yat-sen, and his apparently hair-brained scheme to build roads collectively “as if by a magic wand”,Footnote 56 it can be seen that Zhou appeared to be successfully putting into practice some of Sun's ideas with regard to the use of manpower in road construction. As recognised by Todd:
“…the Governor Chow [Zhou] proved to the great farming community, the shopkeepers and the ‘carry coolies’ through the province that a renaissance was taking place. With everybody else working, why should they object to doing their share? When the plans were perfected, the governor issued an order to all magistrates along the line of the new road. Each must build a stretch of road before rice planting, the work to be divided fairly among all men in the country. Fifty thousand men were to be put to work in the early part of 1927. None refused. It was a tax that must be paid…”Footnote 57
Such methods are no doubt rightly described in one source as “those of an eastern despot”Footnote 58 but, with the responsibility to build a share of the road falling to individual magistrates (or to individual families according to another source),Footnote 59 there is a certain resonance, not only with more general collective systems such as the Baojia system, and ancient methods of work distribution and corvée labour used throughout Chinese history, but clearly also with those methods advocated by Sun Yat-sen himself in his 1920 call for the reconstruction of China:
“…If we divide the million miles of roads by the four hundred million people, we shall have one mile to every hundred. For one hundred people to build one mile of road is not a very difficult task to accomplish”.Footnote 60
Zhou Xicheng's demise
Returning to the coin itself, in his 1954 study, Eduard Kann, numismatist, collector and author of many influential studies, goes into some detail concerning its physical appearance. He identifies some subtle variations in design when pointing to the existence of several different types: the shaocao 少草 (scant vegetation) type and the maocao 茂草 (dense vegetation) type; those with “dots” on the bonnet of the car and those without.Footnote 61 These variations are discussed by him in some detail:
“In classifying the deviations of the Kwei-Chow [Guizhou] motor car dollar, one finds a group where the ventilator is depicted by lines curved at the top. Beneath the horizontal line on which the car rests, in the southeastern corner, one sees 2 parallel blades of grass. This is the ordinary type. The other group, which is not met with so often, shows the ventilator depicted with straight lines, each ending with a dot on the top of the line. There are other deviations to be discovered, as minor differences in style of the Chinese ideograms and a number of varieties in the size of the wheel, the windows, the caps, the spare tire [sic] and the fenders…”Footnote 62
Such design details, so important to coin collectors and numismatists, were also crucial to the way the coin was seen by the people of Guizhou and, according to local beliefs, may even have had direct consequences for Zhou's future.
One problem with which the builders of railways in the nineteenth century and the builders of roads in the 1920s had to cope with, was the reconciliation of local beliefs with the destruction of the countryside brought about by such large construction projects, and this was an issue with which Zhou also had to contend. In common with remote, and not so remote provinces, Guizhou had its fair share of local customs that may have had an impact on the planning of large-scale building projects. According to one suggestion, local beliefs—apparently considered “superstitious” by Zhou Xicheng—posed as an obstacle for his road building plans. Todd suggests that Zhou believed in “abolishing superstition” and had punished one “influential man”, in Guiyang for “trying to invoke feng-shui (the ‘wind-water’ powers) to interfere in road making”.Footnote 63 This is all very well, but other reports suggest that Zhou was, on the contrary, “a great believer in portents and such arts as physiognomy” and even practiced geomancy himself.Footnote 64 Two examples of his close engagement with geomancy mentioned in The North-China Herald, are worthy of note. First, he is said to have chosen the site of his mother's grave according to “his own ideas of ‘feng-shui’”, and secondly, that on the discovery of two large snakes in a temple wall (after it was demolished to make way for a road) Zhou apparently “gave orders for the serpents to be worshipped” and for a temple to be built in their honour.Footnote 65 It is not clear who should be believed on the question of his beliefs; perhaps such contradictory evidence might even be the result of the practitioners of two or more contending geomantic schools disagreeing amongst themselves. The possibilities for contending schools in Guizhou are many; in addition to the geomancers and Daoist priests in the Guiyang area, there were also shaman from various indigenous groups, including the Dong, Hmong and Yao.Footnote 66 Owing to the vast number of possibilities that present themselves here it is difficult to decide just who the local fengshui priests advising Zhou might have been. It is certainly no surprise, though, that in newspaper reports such identification is not seen as a priority; contemporary journalists preferring instead to refer to such figures as “native priests” or “soothsayers”. It was apparently not the case that Zhou Xicheng was inherently against geomancy and local customs, but that he simply chose to ignore the warnings of “soothsayers” with whom he did not agree, or whose advice did not accord with “his own ideas” of fengshui.Footnote 67 The 1933 report, “‘Motor-Car’ Dollar which brought Bad Luck to Kweichow General” suggests that such anonymous “soothsayers” had predicted Zhou's death as a result of the production of the coin. They prophesied that it was Zhou's ill-judged decision to include an image of the car on the coin, together with his name inscribed in Chinese characters below that was to be the very reason for his demise.Footnote 68 If one examines the coin carefully, it is indeed the case that stylised forms of the Chinese characters for his name, xi 西 and cheng 成, can be seen concealed amongst the vegetation depicted on the coin.Footnote 69
“General Chow [Zhou] failed to reckon with the sooth-sayers or native priests, who immediately whispered it about among the superstitious that the placing of the characters for Gen. Chow's name under the picture of the automobile could have no other significance than the violent demise of Gen. Chow in an automobile accident”.Footnote 70
According to this report, it was specifically because Zhou asked for his name to appear on the coin, and that it appeared there lying in the undergrowth, that the “soothsayers” believed he would lose his life.
Zhou's apparent efforts to distance himself from the warlord regime, to avert political misfortune, and perhaps even to show a degree of humility, by not including his own image on the coin—choosing instead to depict a detailed image of his car—apparently backfired and led directly to his demise. Zhou lost his life in battle on 22 May 1929, fighting against a representative of the Nationalist Government who had been ordered to bring Guizhou into line following Zhou's support for the New Guangxi Clique that opposed Chiang Kai-shek's authority.Footnote 71 Concerning the last moments of Zhou's life, the 1933 article in The China Weekly Review presents the tragi-comic vision of Zhou in his car—now serving as a military vehicle—charging into battle. We can imagine him speeding along, brandishing the sabre he wore as part of his formal dress, and leaning out through the window in a manner reminiscent of the keystone cops.
Evidently it really was his beloved car that was to be his undoing. This car, the symbol of his part in the Good Road Movement and in famine relief, was so important to him that he had it depicted on a commemorative coin “as a means of popularising the doctrine of good roads”.Footnote 72 The car performed its role as a military vehicle a little too well, as, on charging the enemy, his infantrymen were left far behind.Footnote 73 The not so comic vision of Zhou surrounded by his enemy, failing to make an escape, overpowered and left to drown in the reedy marshland in front of his car, had been inadvertently recorded on the coin by order of Zhou himself, and had become nothing less than a premonition of his own death.Footnote 74
