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50 000 000 Dollars - Hell Bank Note
| Issuer | Heaven and Earth Bank (天地銀行) |
|---|---|
| Year | |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Printed in blue on white paper, the central vignette depicts a traditional Chinese palatial building amid trees and clouds. Denomination and the inscription DOLLARS appear in a panel at left, with serial number repeated in both upper corners and the issuer inscription along the bottom border. |
| Reverse lettering | 50000000 HELL BANK NOTE 伍仟萬 天地通用紙幣 DOLLARS |
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| Comments |
Hell Bank Notes are ceremonial joss paper manufactured for ritual burning at funerals and ancestral offerings — the smoke is understood to transfer the currency to the deceased in the afterlife. The "Heaven and Earth Bank" imprint is a conventional fiction with no issuing authority behind it; the name appears across countless manufacturers' output and carries no institutional meaning.
The denominations printed on these notes inflated dramatically over the twentieth century, tracking a folk logic that the dead require ever-larger sums to navigate bureaucratic hierarchies in the afterlife. Fifty million is now a modest figure in the genre.