How many kinds of Sang Pyong Tong Bo are there?

Answer 1

48 (+ 1) mint mark marked coins, each of these have furnace numbers indicating which furnace was used to cast the coin in question.

There are 44 based on the 1000 character song (Chinese variant of the alphabet song).

5 elemental based coins.

10 celestial based coins.

12: the 12 Terrestrial branches.

8 tri-gram based coins.

14 Miscellaneous character based coins.

Note: ''Special'' characters like Crescents, suns and moons are not accounted.

This would make a total 97 (+ 1) different designs excluding furnace-serial-numbers and ''special'' characters.

(+ 1) = the same mint mark only a different character.