Dollar banknotes were printed from 1907 to 1914 in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $25, and $50. 610,000 5¢ and 670,000 10¢
cupronickel coins were issued in 1909. The Deutsch-Asiatische Bank's banknotes were printed by
Giesecke and Devrient in
Leipzig, Germany, and then shipped to East Asia. The coins were struck at the
imperial mint in
Berlin. The ship transporting the 1914 banknote issue to Qingdaowhich included new $100 and $200 bills as wellwas intercepted by a
British submarine, so those notes were never in circulation. The Jiaozhou Bay concession had permission from the Chinese government to allow its notes to circulate throughout
Shandong Province, so that many more notes were issued than those strictly required for the colony's commerce. The coins were declared the sole legal tender of the colony, forcing Chinese and foreign traders to exchange other silver dollars and copper cash for them. Immediately following the 1914
Japanese occupation of Qingdao at the onset of
World War I, there was about $15,000
specie in circulation and another $750,000 in banknotes valued at a roughly 1:2.5 exchange rate with
gold-backed American dollars. More than $1 million in notes were burned during the siege and, though more coins had been minted and in use, much of it was dumped into
Jiaozhou Bay to keep it out of Japanese hands. In the same way, the banknotes had been redeemed using the assets of the bank's other branches in
East Asia and then destroyed, maintaining the value of the remaining currency despite the loss of the colony.
Allied with important trading partners and facing a mass exodus of their business to
Jinan, the Japanese occupation seized the assets of the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank but allowed the
Yokohama Specie Bank and
HSBC to continue supporting and honoring its notes, which continued to circulate in the
now Japanese colony even in preference to the occupation's own
silver-backed yen. ==Jiaozhou tael==