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Yearning for Olympics yuan creates collector queues

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-07-10 15:32

As China sounded the one-month countdown to the Olympics, thousands of bank branches across the country opened their doors to huge queues of people, some of whom spent the night on the street, to get the chance to own one of the 6 million 10-yuan banknotes issued to mark the upcoming Games.

The face value of these new notes is less than $1.5, but they're being traded for 30 times that much.

The notes, released by the People's Bank of China (PBOC, the central bank) starting on Tuesday, are ordinary currency and will circulate the same as any banknote, assuming that collectors let any out of their hands.

At 148.5 millimeters long and 72 mm wide, the new note is slightly larger than the ordinary 10-yuan note. It features the "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium on the front and a statue of Discobolus, the Olympic discus thrower, on the reverse.

Banks will exchange them for ordinary 10-yuan notes, which bear the image of the late leader Mao Zedong. The limit is one per person, which prompted tens of thousands to spend one and sometimes two nights in line.

In Jiangsu's provincial capital Nanjing, where less than 3,000 notes were available, hundreds began lining up at local bank branches on Monday evening, although the banknotes were not released until Wednesday morning. By that point, the queues were thousands of meters long, and police had to be called to maintain order.

Notes were in short supply elsewhere, including major cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, as well as Hainan and Shaanxi provinces.

In Beijing, more than 500 people were waiting at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's branch in Xuanwu, in southwest Beijing, by 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday -- but only 200 banknotes were available.

A woman in the queue surnamed Li told Xinhua that she had been waiting outside the bank since 5 p.m. on Tuesday.

She said she spent the night with about 80 people who had brought food and drink, including a man in his 80s.

"I'm very lucky to get one banknote. I wish more were available so that more people would have a chance," she said.

Zhou Wei also felt lucky, after queuing for more than three hours to get one new note, which he instantly sold for 350 yuan.

"I came to the bank at about 5:30 in the morning," the 21-year-old college student in Nanjing told Xinhua in a telephone interview.

"I was about the 20th to get the banknote in the queue and before I left the bank, a guy came to me and offered to buy it for 350 yuan. I agreed. I thought: 350 yuan minus the 10 yuan I paid to exchange for the banknote, not bad for my three hours' waiting, " he said.

Like Zhou, many who got one of the notes chose to flip them at a tidy profit.

In the southern province of Hainan, a man who would only give his surname of Liao, told Xinhua that he would be willing to purchase as many of the new notes as possible at 300 yuan each. But Liao failed to get even one note by Wednesday afternoon, because the "supply is much too limited," he said.

According to a vice director with Hainan's PBOC Haikou Branch, Wu Lihe, it is illegal to trade the new note at above-face value. He said currency management authorities will closely watch for such illegal activities, and will work with public security departments to punish those involved.

But on taobao.com, one of China's most popular auction sites, more than 50 people have already offered to sell their banknotes for prices of up to 9,999 yuan.