Today we had an interesting little occurrence, as a result of which I learned some cool stuff, so I thought I’d share it.

I was out walking the dog – it was grey and rainy and miserable, and neither of us were terribly enthused about being out. However, the options being:

a) stay inside, with the dog doing wall of death round the sofas all day, stealing everything I am about to pick up and then playing chasey-chasey till told to leave it, or

b) walk in the rain and then have a quiet afternoon while he snoozes it off,

it’s generally better to get the boots on and take him out for some sniffs. So off we went, plodding along the muddy bridle-path to the field.

Lots of dogs and horses go along the bridle path (and sometimes deer too). The Luxury Lurcher (for it was he) filled that long, elegant snout with all the sniffs and left his own peemail behind to update the local dogs on his general state of health and what he had for breakfast: it’s basically social media for dogs. At the corner there is a bin and while His Lordship was checking in there, I noticed a piece of litter in the grass. It was right next to the bin.

Would it have been so much extra effort to actually put it in? I thought as I picked it up; it was a small piece of paper, wet through (hopefully by rain rather than dog updates!) but looking more closely at it, I paused. It appeared to be a burnt dollar note. There were pictograms on it – it was obviously not American dollars, but some sort of Asian currency. I have no real idea who else has dollars – Hong Kong maybe? – or how much they’re worth, but the figure in the corner was $10,000. That seemed rather a lot to burn, even if a dollar is worth less than a penny, for example.

After a moment’s thought, I decided to take it home. There was more to this than appeared and I wanted to take a bit of time to consider it, but it was fragile with wet. I put the fragment in a plastic bag to protect it and so I wouldn’t lose it in my pocket. It would be easier to look closely at it once it was dry, and I had a lot of questions to answer. Where had it come from? How much was it actually worth? And why on earth had someone tried to burn it?

Where I live, there isn’t a huge Asian population, but there is near us a small concentration of people of all sorts of nationalities on a campus-based site. It’s possible that some of them may be incredibly well off as there are some very affluent areas locally… but even so, if the note was of great worth, why would you burn it? And why next to a poo bin, of all places?

If you were burning it to get rid of incriminating evidence, you’d make sure it was completely burned or at least put the remainder in the poo bin.

If you were burning a high-value note to make a point about your style and riches, why stand next to a poo bin to do it? Surely it would be better done on the terrace of a bar, and then extinguished in a glass of vintage champagne? 🙂

It was a nice little mystery; none of it made much in the way of sense and I was intrigued. So once home, I dried it out and then laid it out for a closer look.

This is what I had picked up:

The obvious next step was to see what I could find on the internet, so I cracked open the computer and went to commune with the wisdom of the ancients (hey, Google dates back to 1998 and as my nieces consider that positively ancient!)

All I had to go on was the figure of $10,000 and the name “Yin Lo-” on the back, but being of an enquiring and determined type (*cough*nosey*cough*) I mustered up my Google ninja-ing skills and sallied forth into cyberspace. Sure enough, Google had the answers (as always) in a combo of pages from Wikipedia and a journalist called Paul Slade. So let me tell you what it was that I had retrieved…

According to journalist Paul Slade in his article Satan’s Own Bankers: Chinese Hell Money, the fragment in my possession was part of a “Hell note” – also known as “ghost money”.

So what is Hell money?

Wikipedia says:

“In traditional Chinese belief, [the underworld] is thought to be where the souls of the dead are first judged by the Lord of the Earthly Court, Yan Wang. After this particular judgement, they are either escorted to heaven or sent into the maze of underworld levels and chambers to atone for their sins. People believe that even in the Earthly Court, spirits need to use money.”

The word ‘hell’ is supposed to be a misunderstanding brought about (when is it not??) by Christian missionaries who told early converts that all Chinese people were going to hell; this was understood to mean the afterlife generally.

“The word hell on hell bank notes refers to Diyu (simplified Chinese: 地狱; traditional Chinese: 地獄; pinyin: dìyù, “underworld prison”; also 地府, dìfǔ, “underworld court”). These words are printed on some notes.”

They can be used as part of the mourning process, but are also a way to ask favours from ancestors or to send respect to them on anniversaries or dates of significance.They are loosely piled in burners (or more recently in a chalk circle drawn on the ground between residential houses) and burned to send them to the afterlife.

According to Wikipedia:

“Modern Hell bank notes are known for their large denominations, ranging from $10,000 to several billions. The obverse usually bears an effigy of the Jade Emperor, the presiding monarch of heaven in Taoism; his signature, romanised as Yu Wong or Yuk Wong; and the countersignature of Yanluo, King of Hell (閻羅). There is usually an image of the Bank of Hell on the reverse of the notes.

A commonly sold Hell bank note is the $10,000 note that is styled after the old United States Federal Reserve Note. The obverse contains, apart from the portrait of the Jade Emperor, the seal of the Bank of Hell consisting of a picture of the bank itself. Many tiny, faint “Hell Bank Note”s are scattered on the back in yellow. These are sold in packs of 50 to 150, and are wrapped in cellophane.”

The fragment I picked up would have been part of one of these, and the entire note would have looked like something like this, though it’s obviously not the actual same one (image is from Paul Slane’s article):

So this all answers a lot of questions.

If the fragment I found was part of a pile of fifty others and it was burned in an area between residential houses, the likelihood is that it originated on campus, and the updraft carried it into the air and across the fields to settle by the path where I found it, in somewhat unfortunate vicinity to the poo bin. It isn’t evidence of dodgy doings, nor a somewhat bodged attempt to show off – it’s a little fluttering piece of someone’s grief come to rest temporarily.

Now retrieved and dried out, the question is what to do with it.

According to Paul Slade, the practice is mostly important to the older members of the Chinese community, and younger ones do it in honour of their older relatives because it was important to them; perhaps this is a mourning note for someone’s parent or grandparent. Often it would be done at the grave, so perhaps this is someone who could not get to the grave, but still wanted to show their respects.

It’s an interesting thing to have, but tempting as it is to keep it, I can’t find it in me to do so. If this is a part of someone’s grieving process, it wouldn’t be right. I’m glad it didn’t end up rotting beside the poo bin. If that had been a ritual I had done for my Dad when we lost him a couple of years back, I wouldn’t have liked to think it had ended up being trodden into the mud there. But then what?

I’m not going to just put it in the bin, even if the mourner will never know. Grief is sacred, regardless of whether anyone’s watching – and who am I to say that no-one is? The world is full of mysteries. But it’s more that there is a universality of grief. Sooner or later, all of us will lose someone we love, and it’s hard, hard. It makes me want to do right by the unknown mourner, for no other reason than that it’s a thing I can do. So in that spirit, once the rain stops, I’ll go outside, set fire to the last part of the note, and send it up in smoke to complete its journey, whatever that may be.

After all, I am at least a little indebted to the mourner.

Though the note wasn’t really worth ten thousand dollars (at least not in this world!), it afforded me a few hours of interesting research, and left me the richer for an intriguing glimpse into the traditions of another culture. There is a Chinese proverb that suggests, “Learning is a treasure you carry with you always.”

And that is always a bright currency.

Have a lovely weekend:

JAC.