100 Dollars

The Imperial Bank of China was established by imperial edict in 1897 as China's first modern bank, modeled on Western banking institutions and intended to manage government finances. This 100 Dollar note, printed by Barclay & Fry in London, belongs to the bank's inaugural issue — produced before the institution had even established the operational infrastructure to circulate them effectively.

The denomination is exceptionally high for the period. Notes of this value saw negligible retail circulation and were handled almost exclusively in large mercantile transactions, if at all. The bank collapsed into irrelevance after the 1911 revolution, and high-denomination survivors are rare precisely because so few were ever actually used.