Banks print millions of new notes to ensure lai see packets are stuffed for holidays

A desire for crisp new dollar bills to stuff red envelopes for the Lunar New Year will see hundreds of millions of notes withdrawn from the city's banks ahead of the holiday.

Each year, 300 to 400 million new and "good-as-new" notes were issued by banks in response to festival-related demand, the Monetary Authority said.

Red envelopes, known as lai see, where most of this cash will end up, are given to relatives and employees during the first 15 days of the Lunar New Year.

The preference for new bills in lai see was symbolic, said Joseph Bosco, an associate professor of anthropology at Chinese University. "In this context, by putting it in a red envelope, it's in a sense clean, sanitised," Bosco said. "In fact people want new money just to remove the value aspect of it, to make it more like a gift."

He added that giving money as a gift was a longstanding tradition in Chinese culture, unlike in the West where it might be avoided. "The Chinese have been commercialised since the Song dynasty, so giving money is not a problem like it is in more recent times in Europe," he said.

Hong Kong's three note-issuing banks - HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of China - declined to give the total value of the notes that would be made available to customers during the week preceding the festival.

About 45 per cent of the notes withdrawn by customers are "good-as-new", a category introduced to reduce the environmental toll of printing new bills.