1 Yen in Gold

The Bank of Taiwan, established in 1899 under Japanese colonial authority, functioned as a quasi-central bank for Taiwan and extended its operations into southern China and Southeast Asia — a deliberate instrument of Japanese financial expansion into the region. This note predates the aggressive wartime issues by two decades and belongs to the relatively stable early colonial period when the bank maintained genuine convertibility obligations.

The "in Gold" designation carried legal weight, pegging redemption to gold rather than silver, which mattered considerably in a region where silver-denominated currencies still dominated local trade.