FREE: Great old collectible BELGIUM 1905 5 centimes coin!

The listing, Great old collectible BELGIUM 1905 5 centimes coin! has ended.

Nice 1905 Belgium 5 Centime coin. 109 years old this would make a great investment, gift or collectable. An interesting association of this coin was the ruler at the time it was produced. Leopold II (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State as a private venture. Born in Brussels as the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and Louise of Orleans, he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865, reigning for 44 years until his death. This was the longest reign of any Belgian monarch. Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State , a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo . . From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publque for his personal gain. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium. Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection o Ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labor from the natives to harvest and process rubber. His regime was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 2 to 15 million Congolese. They were severely abused under this system. Reports of the deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced in 1908 to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration.
A former client of mine had a relative that sailed the world in Merchant Ships in the late 1800's to WWII collecting coins from around the world. I bought them and this is one of the actual coins he collected.