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10 Cents The Canton Municipal Bank
| Issuer | The Canton Municipal Bank |
|---|---|
| Year | 1933 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette with a portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen set within a starburst guilloche design, flanked by a decorative shield. Two signatures in Chinese script appear below the portrait, with Chinese-character denomination panels in the upper corners and ornate border guilloche framing the entire face. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | 廣州市立銀行 通用銀毫 港票即付 印年二十二國民華中 (Translation: The Canton Municipal Bank Payable in Hong Kong Silver Currency The 22nd Year of the National Republic) |
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| Comments |
The Canton Municipal Bank was a short-lived institution operating in Guangzhou during a period when provincial and municipal authorities across China routinely issued their own paper currency in defiance of — or simply indifferent to — any centralizing monetary policy from Nanjing. Small-denomination fractional notes like this one served real street-level commerce in a city where coin shortages were persistent and silver hoarding common.
Waterlow & Sons produced the plates in London, a routine arrangement for Chinese provincial issuers who wanted security printing they couldn't reliably obtain domestically. The bank's operational lifespan was brief, and surviving notes from this series are genuinely scarce — not because they were carefully preserved, but because they circulated hard in a busy southern port city and most did not survive it.