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Can anyone tell me what currency this is? I think it's Japanese but I'm not sure from when or even where. Someone in my family brought it back from the service.enter image description hereenter image description here

2 Answers 2

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This is a Taiwanese bankote with a face value of TWD $10. It depicts Dr Sun Yat-sen with the Presidential Office in Taipei on the reverse. The text says "Bank of Taiwan", the issuing authority, and "Year 59 of the Republic", i.e. 1960 in the Common Era. This date identifies when the printing plates were designed, not when the specific note was printed or issued. Which means it was part of the first issue of the horizontal series. Prior to it, Taiwanese banknotes were vertical.

There were two versions of the $10 note in the first series, one in red as in the question, and the other in dark blue. The image shown in @JMS's answer is the latter.

Both versions were printed using the same plates, but in different facilities and issued in different years. The blue version was printed by the Bank of Taiwan's Printing Bureau, and first issued on 14 January, 1963. The red version was printed by the Central Engraving and Printing Plant, which was operated by Taiwan's Central Bank. This version was released into general circulation only from 1 August, 1968.

Other denominations from the same series:

enter image description here
From left to right and top to bottom: $5, $10, $50, $100.

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  • If it was printed in 1960 it should be a New Taiwan Dollar (usually abbreviated as NT, so the banknote would be NT$10). The ISO 4217 code is TWD. Dec 15, 2017 at 22:14
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Looks like Semaphore just beat me to it. I found it by googling who uses kanji characters. Then searching on cropped parts of the images (the portrait and bridge and kanji characters) , with "10" and interchanging country names like Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong and finally Taiwan. Took about 20 minutes.

Found the 10 yen note from Taiwan currency circa 1960 with Dr Sun Yat-sen, born 1866 Xiangshan, Guangdong, from China, Portrait from 1925 Beijing.

enter image description here

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  • 1
    Semaphore may have beaten you, but the colours are significantly different. This isn't the red banknote the question asked about. Dec 16, 2017 at 11:58
  • Speaking of the characters - if you try to look up how 10 is written you'll most likely find it as a cross or plus sign ( 十 ). But you won't find that on the note. Instead you see 拾 . I was told that they have two ways to write the numbers and use the more complex one for financial documents so that people won't be able to easily change a number. For example, that 十 could become a 7 (七) or a 5 (五) pretty easily. (To be clear, this isn't the difference between the simplified in China and traditional in Taiwan, two number sets are both used in Taiwan).
    – Readin
    Jan 5, 2018 at 1:11

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