500 EURO - Hell Bank Note

Hell bank notes are joss paper printed for ritual burning at funerals and ancestral offerings across Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhist and Taoist communities — the idea being that the smoke transmits wealth to the deceased in the afterlife. The "Hell Bank" branding, ubiquitous on these items since at least the mid-twentieth century, is a translation artifact: 地府 (Địa Phủ / Dìfǔ) means the underworld or realm of the dead, not a place of punishment in the Western theological sense.

These are not currency in any legal or numismatic sense, and Pick does not catalog them. Collectors acquire them as ephemera or curios.