The Currency
Before I pass on too much information, I guess I'd better let you all know about the money system here. I've thrown a lot of numbers and RMB and yuan around already and I can't imagine everyone knows the information:
1 US Dollar = 8.11 Yuan
1 Yuan = 1 RMB = 1 Kuai
10 Jiao = 1 Yuan (= 10 Mao)
10 Fen = 1 Jiao
5 Yuan = 1 McDonald's Burger
Up until a few weeks ago, the exchange was 8.28 but in celebration of our arrival, the Chinese government revalued the Yuan to 8.11. This effectively cut our income by 2% on the eve of our arrival. All in all, I think we're lucky because if the Chinese government were serious about re-evaluating the Yuan, they probably would have done 20% or more. I think we'd better get some money into our local bank account as soon as possible.
The bank notes in China are multi-colored and multi-sized. There are a few coins for the Fen and Jiao but noone seems to like using coins for anything. It is interesting to note that the Jiao are also called Mao but the pictures of Mao are all on the Yuan (go figure).
The actual exchange rate is then 8.11. From what I can tell, the purchasing power exchange rate is 5:1. So, this means that people spend a 5 RMB note in about the same way that people spend a dollar bill in the US. However, it seems that 5 RMB still gets you a lot more than $1 would in the US. The 100 Yuan note is most obviously the yuppie food stamp ($20 bill) of China (still maintaining the 5:1 ratio). It's seems that every customer is trying to break a 100 Yuan note and every vendor is forever cursing the customers that hand over 100 Yuan notes.
1 US Dollar = 8.11 Yuan
1 Yuan = 1 RMB = 1 Kuai
10 Jiao = 1 Yuan (= 10 Mao)
10 Fen = 1 Jiao
5 Yuan = 1 McDonald's Burger
Up until a few weeks ago, the exchange was 8.28 but in celebration of our arrival, the Chinese government revalued the Yuan to 8.11. This effectively cut our income by 2% on the eve of our arrival. All in all, I think we're lucky because if the Chinese government were serious about re-evaluating the Yuan, they probably would have done 20% or more. I think we'd better get some money into our local bank account as soon as possible.
The bank notes in China are multi-colored and multi-sized. There are a few coins for the Fen and Jiao but noone seems to like using coins for anything. It is interesting to note that the Jiao are also called Mao but the pictures of Mao are all on the Yuan (go figure).
The actual exchange rate is then 8.11. From what I can tell, the purchasing power exchange rate is 5:1. So, this means that people spend a 5 RMB note in about the same way that people spend a dollar bill in the US. However, it seems that 5 RMB still gets you a lot more than $1 would in the US. The 100 Yuan note is most obviously the yuppie food stamp ($20 bill) of China (still maintaining the 5:1 ratio). It's seems that every customer is trying to break a 100 Yuan note and every vendor is forever cursing the customers that hand over 100 Yuan notes.
posted by agoel at
11:28 PM
2 Comments:
We've been finding too many ATMs that like to give out 50 euro (~$62), 100 euro (roughly $125), or 20,000 Hungarian Forint notes (~$100)! Surprisingly, when we've built up enough courage to try to pass one of these off, the merchants haven't shown much annoyance (true, we've chosen such merchants carefully -- fairly nice restaurants, etc).
Of course, now that I just withdrew a bunch of cash for rent on an apartment, the ATM gives a full spectrum of 10s, 20s, and 50s, when I would have been happy with 100s...
Eh... that totally sucks! I'm sure your landlord was really happy to get the rent in small bills. But at least that's better than passing off large notes to small shops!
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