10 000 - Heaven Bank Note

Hell Bank Notes are ritual joss paper printed for burning at funerals and ancestral offerings — the assumption being that the smoke carries currency to the deceased in the afterlife. The practice blends Taoist and Buddhist folk traditions and has no connection to any state monetary system. On Tai Lung is one of the principal commercial manufacturers in Hong Kong supplying the funeral goods trade, and the "Hell Bank" denomination is purely nominal: the numbers are chosen for visual impressiveness, not exchange utility.

Denominations have inflated dramatically over the decades, tracking a kind of ritual one-upmanship among manufacturers. Ten thousand was once ambitious; current production routinely reaches the billions.