10 Taels

The Imperial Bank of China was the country's first Sino-foreign joint venture bank, established in 1897 under a government charter that gave it note-issuing rights — a privilege bitterly contested by existing foreign banks operating in the treaty ports. Barclay & Fry, a London security printer with experience in colonial and overseas currency work, produced the plates for this inaugural series.

The 1898 issue never achieved meaningful circulation. The bank's operational reach was limited, public confidence in domestic paper was fragile, and the Qing financial system was in no condition to support a new institution's currency against silver. Surviving examples are genuinely rare partly because so few entered daily use.

The tael denomination — a unit of account rather than a minted coin — was itself a bureaucratic abstraction that varied in weight and fineness by region.