5 Yuan / Dollars Bank of China

The Bank of China was reorganized under that name in 1912 from the old Qing dynasty's Ta-Ching Government Bank, and by 1918 it was operating as the principal government bank of the Republic of China. The American Bank Note Company had been supplying Chinese bank currency since the late Qing period, and this note belongs to a series produced in New York for circulation across multiple branch locations — the specific place of payment was printed on each note individually, meaning the same basic plate served Peking, Shanghai, Harbin, and a dozen other cities simultaneously.

In 1916, a moratorium crisis had severely damaged public confidence in paper notes issued by both the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications; the 1918 series was part of a deliberate effort to restore credibility through high-quality foreign printing. ABNC's intaglio work was expensive precisely because it signaled institutional seriousness to a skeptical note-holding public.