Opinion | Why Hong Kong’s new banknotes should feature famous faces instead of butterflies, rocks and dim sum

You’ve got to wonder what was going through the minds of Hong Kong Monetary Authority bosses when they opted for a butterfly as one of the themes for our new HK$50 banknote. Some of the designs for the other notes in the 2018 series, to be released in batches in the coming two years, are also a tad dodgy; they are either not representative of our culture, poorly illustrated or come across as too ordinary.

The point of the exercise is mainly to improve security features to make our money harder to forge, but in the process, a better effort could have been made to boost pride and celebrate our rich past. The unfortunate thing is that with a truly cashless society just around the corner, an opportunity may have been missed.

With three retail banks authorised to each issue their versions of five of the six banknote denominations, there was no shortage of space to express ideas. The HKMA chose to be restrictive, though, setting thematic subjects: dim sum for the HK$20, butterflies for the HK$50, Cantonese opera for the HK$100, the Unesco-listed Geopark for the HK$500, and Hong Kong as an international financial centre for the HK$1,000.

Butterflies can be found anywhere in the world and Cantonese opera originated in Guangdong province. The blue colour of the HK$20 note makes some images appear ghostly, although from a design perspective, Bank of China has fared least well among critics. It has been ribbed for an uncharacteristically large dim sum teapot, Geopark rocks that some people contend look like ancient Chinese tombs and perplexingly, for the HK$1,000 bill, a brain with lots of zeros and ones inside.