DescriptionPegu (Bago) is a port city not far from Yangon (Rangoon). It was rich in the 16th century, and the Portuguese took it after Tangot and Arakan destroyed it. They didn’t get to keep it long, the two local belligerents returned and destroyed it some more. The Mon revolted against the Burmese king in 1740 and established a kingdom, which lasted 17 years. Exactly who made the Pegu coins is uncertain.Myanmar is pronounced “Burma.” It is a large country in the shadow of giant neighbors. It is filled with people of various ethnicities who have never gotten along. The currently ascendant Burmese conquered the inhabitants several centuries ago. Some noteworthy acts of mass violence have occurred. My favorite is when a certain king had 9000 of his subjects (no citizens, just subjects) murdered so their hearts could be burned to make a magic potion to bring him luck.South Asia generally is taken to include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Some people would like to include Afghanistan and Burma, but that’s a minority opinion.By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.
