5 Taels

The Imperial Bank of China was established in 1897 as China's first modern government-chartered bank, created partly to service foreign debt obligations and manage customs revenue. This 1898 note is among the earliest issues, printed by Barclay & Fry in London — a firm better known for label and commercial printing that handled some early colonial and Asian bank work before larger security printers dominated the field.

The tael denomination is significant. China had not yet adopted a unified decimal currency; the tael was a weight-based unit that varied by region, making standardized paper denominations politically awkward and commercially unreliable. The Imperial Bank collapsed into reorganization after 1911, and surviving early notes from this series are genuinely uncommon.