Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, like his immediate predecessors held a longstanding ambition to conquer the ancestral Mughal homeland of Transoxiana (Central Asia, now Uzbekistan) and annex it into the Mughal Empire. In the years of 1638-1640 AD. Shah Jahan’s Mughal forces, along with its Persian allies, conquered Kandahar and then Balkh, as a prelude to an invasion of Central Asia and the Ferghana Valley from where Babur hailed. It is here and then that these coins were struck. This marks the first and only time Mughal forces crossed the Hindu Kush. However, the campaign was short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful, thereby bringing to an end, once and for all, the Mughal dream of reconquering Transoxiana. Excerpt describing the coin: “Shah Jahan mounted his campaign in 1646 at the invitation of the deposed Khan of Bukhara, who controlled Balkh at the time, and his forces were able to seize Balkh and its substantial treasury with ease in July of that year. However, the difficulties of maintaining an occupying force so far from the empire, in a place much colder than the Indian troops were used to, and facing constant harassment at the hands of the large numbers of Uzbek partisans, forced the Mughal army to reach a truce and withdraw by October 1647. Thus the occupation lasted just over a year. Abdul Hamid Lahori in 'Padshahnama' tells us that khanis of 4gm weight standard of local coinage, in which copper would be mixed with the silver, would be struck and exchanged at a rate of four to a rupee.”