50 Dollars The Futien Bank

The Futien Bank — better known as the Fudian Bank — was a provincial institution operating under the Yunnan warlord government, and by the late 1920s its notes were circulating in a region effectively independent from Nationalist control in Nanjing. The American Bank Note Company printed this issue, as it did much of the Yunnan provincial currency in this period, working from New York on commission from a government Nanjing would not have recognized as fully legitimate.

Yunnan's geographic isolation — bordered by French Indochina, Burma, and Tibet — meant its currency operated in a largely separate monetary orbit, with cross-border trade in the frontier zones giving these notes a reach beyond the province itself.