I’ve been saving up some old Hong Kong money for a while and today I finally decided to photograph and post them here. First up, we have a $10 bill from 1994, printed by Standard Chartered:
In Hong Kong, different banks can print the same denomination bill with different designs. Generally, the color is the same, but it can sometimes be confusing (i.e 50s and 20s are similar in appearance and people often mix them up). Anyhow, I noticed this bill because it is green (the old color for $10 bills) and because it is paper. Today’s bills are purple and plastic.
Next up, we have some coins, all minted with Queen Elizabeth’s portrait on them:
I seem to encounter the old 50-cent coins the most. 20-cent coins are pretty common as well, to the point that I’ve stopped collecting them:
Lastly, we have the 1-dollar coins. In my experience, these are few and far between:
These are the coins I remember from my childhood. By the time we came back to Hong Kong in the 90s after first moving to America, the decommissioning of these coins had already begun. Obviously, a special administrative region of China cannot have Queen Elizabeth’s portrait on its currency, so they’ve replaced it with Hong Kong’s flower, Bauhinia blakeana (it’s also on Hong Kong’s flag).
I’m trying to get lean again so I’ll be putting these coins and the bill back into circulation. Now that they’re in the museum, I’ll just view this post whenever I need an old HK money fix. Hope you’ve enjoyed this museum post.