10 Great Yuan Tainan Silver Note

The Tainan Official Bank Note General Bureau was established in the frantic weeks following the Treaty of Shimonoseki, when Qing China ceded Taiwan to Japan and a group of officials and local elites declared the short-lived Taiwan Republic in a desperate bid to resist annexation. This note was issued as part of that government's attempt to fund military resistance — the Bureau had almost no hard currency backing and the Republic itself collapsed within five months, Japanese forces entering Tainan in October 1895.

Circulation was effectively zero by the time the ink was dry on many examples. Notes from this bureau are among the rarest products of any Chinese-language issuing authority from the nineteenth century, and survivorship is almost entirely a matter of luck rather than careful preservation.