10 000 000 Hell Bank Note

Hell Bank Notes are ceremonial paper offerings burned at Chinese funerals and ancestral rites, intended to supply the deceased with funds in the afterlife. The practice draws on centuries of Taoist and folk Buddhist tradition, but the modern printed format — complete with invented bank names, serial numbers, and absurdly inflated denominations — dates largely from the mid-twentieth century, when manufacturers began styling them after real currency to make them more convincing as symbolic substitutes.

The denomination arms race is genuine: billions gave way to trillions, and this ten-million figure is now considered modest by current production standards.