5 Dollars

The Imperial Bank of China was established in 1897 as China's first government-chartered modern bank, a direct product of the post-Sino-Japanese War reform push under the Qing court. Its founding capital was partly foreign, and its management was split between a British chief inspector and Chinese directors — an arrangement that generated persistent institutional friction.

Bradbury, Wilkinson produced the plates in London, which was standard for Chinese government and quasi-government paper of the period, as no domestic security printing capacity yet existed at the required technical level. The bank's issuing life was short; it effectively collapsed by 1911, and surviving notes from the 1898 series are genuinely scarce across all denominations.