100 Dollars New Fu-Tien Bank

The New Fu-Tien Bank was a regional institution operating out of Yunnan Province during one of the most fractious periods in Republican Chinese history, when provincial warlords effectively ran their own monetary systems independent of Peking. A 100 Dollar denomination from a provincial bank of this period implies local commercial ambition well beyond everyday transaction use — these were instruments of trade finance and inter-merchant settlement, not street currency.

ABNC's involvement is the key technical point here. The plate work came out of their New York shop, which accounts for the crisp intaglio quality that distinguishes these Yunnan issues from contemporaneous notes produced by smaller Asian presses. S3000 is a genuinely scarce survivor; Yunnan paper currency from the early Republican period was subject to repeated demonetizations as political control of the province changed hands through the 1920s.