Tainan resident Wu Tsang-yuan (吳藏願), a banknote collector who describes himself as the “most loaded man in Tainan,” has a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill and other economic oddities in his sizable collection.
“I could have been a rich man if they did not take that out of circulation,” Wu said of the 100 trillion dollar bill.
Printed during Zimbabwe’s years of hyperinflation, the bill was reportedly worth US$0.40 in 2009. The nation has since abandoned printing its own currency.
Photo: Wang Chieh, Taipei Times
Other banknotes with a high denomination in his collection include 500 billion dinar bills issued by the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and 3 billion dollar notes issued by the Republic of China (ROC) treasury, printed during Taiwan’s post-Chinese Civil War hyperinflation and prior to the adoption of the New Taiwan dollar, Wu said.
Wu said his hobby began in the late 1970s, when he was serving as a soldier in Kinmen County.
When buying produce at a local market, he said he encountered a strange 10 cent note bearing a stamp that read: “For Kinmen circulation only.”
Intrigued, he asked a vegetable seller about the unfamiliar banknote.
The vendor said that the government had created a special currency for the Kinmen archipelago’s exclusive use that could not be exchanged, an answer that sparked his interest in rare and out-of-circulation bills.
After completing his military service, Wu worked as a barber and began to purchase rare banknotes.
“Some people buy cars and real estate with their money; I buy banknotes with mine,” Wu said, adding that he paid as much as NT$70,000 for some of the rarer ones.
The most valuable item in his collection is a 100 dollar bill printed by the ROC treasury in 1949, which had two concurrent editions: the so-called xiaohua (little colorful) and the dahua (big colorful) notes, so named by collectors because the former were printed in one color, while the latter were printed in several.
One of the rare dahua bills, such as the one he owns, could sell for up to NT$100,000 at auction, Wu said.
His children’s disinterest in the collection has prompted him to consider selling it or donating it to a museum, Wu said, adding that he makes an exception for the dahua bill, which he does not want to part with.
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