Qing dynasty coin may show ancient Chinese trade link with Australia

In Australia these days, China seems to shadow the antipodean nation's future. China's appetite for natural resources has reshaped Australia's economy, and the threat of its expanding navy has led Australian officials to approve the deployment of US marines on Australian soil.

But a team of amateur Australian archaeologists has found a curious piece of evidence linking the Chinese to a much earlier age in Australia's history.

On a recent expedition to a remote island off the coast of the Northern Territory, the archaeologists, who call themselves the Past Masters, unearthed an 18th-century Qing dynasty coin. "It certainly shows the contact between northern Australia and the trade with the 'middle kingdom', with China," Mike Owen, a member of the expedition, told Australia's ABC TV this week.

Past Masters, based in Darwin, posted an image of the coin on its Facebook page. It features Manchurian script, which was the native language of China's imperial Qing dynasty.

The coin's presence is hardly proof that a Qing fleet would have landed on Australia's shores, of course. It's far more likely it ended up on the island off the continent as part of a linked chain of Asian trade that threaded China throughout Southeast Asia.