5 Yuan / Dollars Bank of China

The Bank of China was established by presidential decree in February 1912, just weeks after the Qing dynasty's collapse, and was initially capitalized at a fraction of its authorized level. These early Republican-era notes were ordered from the American Bank Note Company before the bank had any real operational infrastructure — the ambition of issuing a modern national currency ran well ahead of the institutions required to manage one.

The 1913 series exists with place-of-payment overprints for numerous branch cities, and those local variants differ substantially in scarcity. An unoverprinted example carries less premium than a branch-specific one from a minor city like Wuchang or Chungking, where surviving quantities are genuinely small.