The Chinese Panda coin is one of the few government issued bullion coins to change the reverse design every year.
This year’s reverse design depicts a panda bear playing with a tree branch with a bamboo forest in the background and the coin’s face value.
Giant pandas (often referred to as simply ‘pandas’) are black and white bears. In the wild, they are found in thick bamboo forests, high up in the mountains of central China.
This coin is legal tender of the People’s Republic of China. This beautiful release continues a more than thirty-year old tradition which began in 1983.
The Panda is China’s flagship coin series. Silver Pandas are a popular and well-known coin type around the world, and along with the American Eagle, Canadian Maple Leaf, Australian Koala, UK Britannia, and Mexican Liberty coins are one of the six major silver coin investment choices internationally.
Officially announced on the 5th August 2014, China’s new coin grading system is still in its infancy and trial stages, but the first pieces with Yuantai grades to hit online auction houses have created quite a storm among bidders.Chinese bidders, particularly the more patriotic ones, will have been waiting eagerly for their chance to get their hands on the first pieces to be appraised under the Yuantai system. It grades coins on a 100-point scale. In light of the experience of international systems of coin grading, and in combination with the unique characteristics of the Chinese currency market, the creators of China’s new grading system (currently still in its trial stages) have decided to use a 100-point scale. Within this scale, coins graded 80-100 are not for general circulation (meaning those coins produced for numismatic collectors and investors). Coins with grades below 80 are for general circulation. Therefore modern gold and silver coins would have grades within the 80-100 interval.
One major difference between the Chinese system and those currently used in the US is that, for the time being, the Chinese system makes no distinction between proof and BU coins. This is mainly because the production methods and distribution processes for BU and proof coins in the US are very different, whereas in China the process is actually quite similar.