A brief study of the issuance of Farmer's Bank of China banknotes

Farmers Bank of China is one of the four biggest banknote issuers in the era of Republic of China. This article here is to generalize some idea about the issuance amount of the FBC banknotes and their potentials in the future.

Generally speaking, CBC (Central Bank of China) issued largest amount of notes during that time. The second issuer should be Bank of China and the third is Bank of Communications, but these two banks issued more or less the same amount of notes to my feeling. This is just a feeling, I have to say, because I have never started a thorough study about them. Lastly, Farmers Bank of China issued the least notes among these four banks.

Recently the consumption of ROC banknotes has increased due to the growing market of banknote gift sets containing them. Basically, once a gift set book is sold, the notes contained in it could be considered as "consumed" or "deposited", and will not go back to the market in a long time. So with more and more notes going into gift sets and being sold to people, the remnant amount of notes in the market will constantly drop, making them more and more precious. And, since the four biggest banks usually show up together in gift sets, the FBC notes will be consumed faster than the other 3 banks notes due to the smallest starting amount.

Here is a general summary of issuance amounts of different "common" types of FBC notes:

1 yuan 1935 ~300 M pcs (million pieces)

5 yuan 1935 ~220 M pcs

10 yuan 1935 ~320 M pcs

50 cents 1936 ~200 M pcs

10 cents 1937 ~120 M pcs

20 cents 1937 ~100 M pcs

1 yuan 1940 ~100M pcs

10 yuan 1940 ~150 M pcs

1 yuan 1941 ~480 M pcs

5 yuan 1941 ~380 M pcs

100 yuan 1941 140 M pcs

100 yuan 1942 30 M pcs

Figure 1, 10 Yuan 1935, FBC

Figure 2, 100 Yuan 1942, FBC

There is no clue or trace indicating that one prefix and serial number could represent more than one piece of note. Hence those common types above totaled an amount of ~2.5 billion pieces. Those are the types that could be used in making gift sets. All other types are simply too rare and expensive to be used.

As a comparison, the 1960 2 yuan banknote issued by PBC has an issuance of about 5 billion. Now the 2 yuan worths more than 200 dollars a piece.

This is not suggesting that any FBC notes will be worth that much, because the life cycles of these notes are quite different. The PBC always do good jobs in picking and recycling worn notes, so the existing amount of earlier issued RMB in the market, especially for those early notes, is usually quite small, as 1% or 0.1% of the original issuance. The ROC banks did not seem to perform such activities very much. Then the existing amount of FBC notes could be tens or hundreds of times greater than that of 1960 2 yuan.

However, it could be a chance. If the trend of using ROC notes in gift sets continue, the FBC notes will gain better premium than the other 3 banks notes for sure.

This is just my guess though. We will see.
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