White Collar | Joseph Yam – the man who replaced The Queen with the Bauhinia
Replacing millions of coins bearing The Queen’s head was a carefully planned exercise. But some of those older ones, still in circulation, could earn you a mint
Joseph Yam Chi-kwong, former chief executive of Hong Kong Monetary Authority, has offered some nice historical background behind the plans to replace millions of Hong Kong coins bearing The Queen’s head, with those minted with the Bauhinia flower.
For many the coins’ transition from queen to flower, has become a strong symbol of the British handover of Hong Kong back to China.
But who actually decided when and how the change would happen to the currency?
According to Yam, “secret communications channels” had been created between Hong Kong and British financial officials as early as the 1980s, on how the city’s financial arrangements would be handled in the run up to, and after, the handover.
A civil servant who had been focused on finance, Yam was among the group of top officials, for instance, who set up the peg system in 1983, linking the Hong Kong dollar at 7.8 to the greenback.
That peg’s introduction couldn’t have been more timely. In the early 1980s, there was growing confidence crisis in Hong Kong over when Britain and China would actually start to negotiate the handover.