Tender is the note

Here's what happens when you pour money into a utopian campaign to trumpet Hong Kong as Asia's world city while scrimping on promoting the bizarre new $10 note.

Two days after the legal tender quietly went into circulation without fanfare last Tuesday, a woman attending a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in Causeway Bay used one of the new purple notes while paying for a book by author Simon Winchester, one of the event's speakers.

But a bewildered cashier rejected the note, insisting it was not real money. The woman tried to explain and showed the cashier the official markings on the paper, all to no avail. In frustration, she walked off without buying the book.