The Only Place To Cash In Your Chips

Eric Ellis, Hong Kong

03/22/1994

IMAGINE a bank that won't bounce your cheques, that issues unlimited credit and doesn't ask for references or repayment; a bank that doesn't charge fees and whose manager always says yes. Welcome to the Bank of Hell.

Man Sing Store, in Mercury St, a gritty back alley of Hong Kong's North Point district, is a branch office. Clients come here to stock up on fiscal derivatives to ease their passage through the afterlife.

Among the Bank of Hell's more intriguing items are its cheque books for the big deal, passports with pages for visas for monitoring one's Trans-Hell empire and billion-dollar notes for bribing officials.

The Bank of Hell has begun issuing credit cards in colours (green, platinum and gold) that American Express would recognise - a gesture to Chinese greenies who fear the environmental consequences of symbolically burning thousands of billion-dollar notes.

The credit cards and notes usually bear auspicious numbers - lots of eights, threes, sixes and twos, signifying prosperity, and longevity. (The same themes are common to many Hong Kong Telecom numbers).

As befits an Asian business, the Bank of Hell is expanding.

Bank sources have confided to The Australian Financial Review that it plans to issue golf club debenture certificates soon for big swingers, and preferential share allotments, apparently because Hell, like Hong Kong, is plagued by massive public issue oversubscriptions.

All of which, and the world's 1.5 billion Chinese, have made Hell one of the leading financial centres.

Bank of Hell-issued products can be found anywhere where Chinese are dying- in most of the world's Chinatowns and, privately, in China itself, defying the ban on public superstition by the communist regime.

And just as a David Jones might issue a gift list for wedding guests to help a couple starting out on Life, Man Sing issues a list for funeral-goers for a person embarking on Death.

The 52-item list includes such essentials as a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, helicopter, gold bars, rice cookers (after all, this is Asia), mobile phones(after all this is Hong Kong) and spittoons (after all this is China) -all made of paper for burning at one's funeral.

There are even his-and-her funeral kits. The female version has a paper compact, hairbrush, bracelet and earrings for use at Hell's balls.

The male kit has a paper gold Rolex watch, a calculator, a fountain pen for all the deals signed in the hereafter and a gold lighter for the celebratory cigar to close.

Chinese society has it that death in the hereafter is not unlike life -tough - and spirits need all the help they can get. Chinese hell - only gods go to heaven - has 18 levels.

The good occupy the first few levels, the bad the bottom layers. The judge of where one goes is Yim Lo Wong.

One's spirit arrives at the Pearly Gates courthouse to confront Yim, who is armed with his omniscient Book of Earthly Deeds that lists everything done in Life.

Yim peruses the list and decides which court will determine at which level of hell the spirit will reside.

If it is sentenced to the 18th level - usually reserved for mobsters, murderers and people who haven't been kind to their elders - there is no redemption. But if one draws a better level there is room to negotiate.

Enter the Bank of Hell.

Funeral-goers lavish the dead with wads of notes, cheques and credit cards

Most of it is designed for use in the afterlife, to provide as extravagant a standard of dying as possible.

But good funeral-goers will set aside a little bit more for backhanders, bribes and gratuities for Hell officials to arrange a higher level and better chance of reincarnation as something worthwhile.

The Bank of Hell's credit cards have proved a big hit.

The Man Sing store's Mr Shek Wai-man claims the Bank of Hell doesn't charge interest nor will one's credit card be rejected: "The best thing to do is to ask your loved ones to deposit the notes into your credit card account. You will then die without any worries at all."