100 Yuan Panda

The Panda gold series launched in 1982 at the initiative of the People's Bank of China partly as a foreign exchange earner during the early reform period under Deng Xiaoping. By 1985 the series had established enough collector momentum in Western markets — particularly the United States — that demand was outpacing initial production estimates.

The 1985 issue is the last in the series to carry a fixed panda design before the annual design rotation became a deliberate and permanent policy, a distinction that sharpened retrospective collector interest in the earlier dates considerably.