10 Yuan Celebrating Spring

Issued as part of China's annual Lunar New Year commemorative program, which the People's Bank of China established in the 1980s as both a cultural project and a hard-currency export product aimed squarely at the overseas Chinese collector market. By 1997, the series had grown into a reliable foreign exchange earner, with mintages calibrated to demand from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and diaspora buyers rather than domestic circulation.

1997 carried obvious political weight — the handover of Hong Kong on July 1st dominated the year's commemorative calendar, making non-handover issues from that year somewhat overshadowed in the secondary market.