Helen Wang

Curator of East Asian Money
Coins and banknotes of East Asia, seventh century BC to the present Department:
Coins and Medals

 

Helen Wang looks after the Museum’s collection of East Asian coins and banknotes. Her special interests include the archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), his extensive collections, the Silk Road and the use of textiles as money.

She has also published other lesser known aspects of the British Museum’s East Asian money collection: for example, Chinese secret society money and membership certificates; the logistics of transporting copper for coinage in nineteenth century China; paper money design in Shanghai in the 1900s; bronze token money of Jiangsu province in the 1930s; images of Mao Zedong on Chinese money in the twentieth century.

Contact

hwang@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7323 8172

Current projects

  • Working with specialists on the subject of textiles as money on the Silk Road.

  • Editing a collection of papers relating to the machine-struck coinage of China.

External fellowships/ honorary positions

  • Hon. Secretary, Royal Numismatic Society

Recent publications

Helen Wang (ed.), The Music of Ink at the British Museum, Saffron Books, 2012

Helen Wang (ed.), Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections (British Museum Research Publication 184, 2012)

Shin’ichi Sakurai, Helen Wang and Peter Kornicki, with Nobuhisa Furuta, Timon Screech and Joe Cribb,Catalogue of the Japanese Coin Collection (pre-Meiji) at the British Museum (British Museum Research Publication 174, 2010)

H. Wang and J. Perkins (eds) Handbook to the Collections of Sir Aurel Stein in the UK (British Museum Research Publication 129, 2008)

H. Wang, Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (British Museum Research Publication 169, 2009)

Zhao Feng, Helen Wang, Helen Persson, Frances Wood, Wang Le and Xu Zheng (eds), Textiles from Dunhuang in UK Collections (Shanghai: Donghua University Press, 2007). Published in two separate Chinese and English editions. Chinese edition:《敦煌絲綢藝術全集：英藏卷》, 上海东华大学出版社, 2007 年.

H. Wang, M. Cowell, J. Cribb, S. Bowman (eds), Metallurgical Analysis of Chinese Coins at the British Museum (British Museum Research Publication 152, 2005)