https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/world/asia/nepal-japan-yen-argeli.html

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Asia Pacific|On Himalayan Hillsides Grows Japan's Cold, Hard Cash
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/world/asia/
nepal-japan-yen-argeli.html

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People working outdoors in a hilly area, performing some kind of
labor involving plants stretched out across wooden benches.
Workers cleaning argeli bark in the Ilam district of eastern Nepal.
Thousands of miles away, in Japan, the bark will be used to make yen
notes.

On Himalayan Hillsides Grows Japan's Cold, Hard Cash

A shrub in impoverished Nepal now supplies the raw material for the
bank notes used in Asia's most sophisticated financial system.

Workers cleaning argeli bark in the Ilam district of eastern Nepal.
Thousands of miles away, in Japan, the bark will be used to make yen
notes.Credit...

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By Bhadra Sharma and Alex Travelli

Photographs by Uma Bista

Bhadra Sharma reported from Kathmandu and Puwamajhuwa village in
Nepal, and Alex Travelli from New Delhi.

  * April 15, 2024

The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between
the world's highest mountains and the tea estates of India's
Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on
the lush hillsides.

But life can be tough. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato
crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Mount Everest. He gave up
on those plants a dozen years ago and resorted to raising one that
seemed to have little value: argeli, an evergreen, yellow-flowering
shrub found wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grew it for fencing or
firewood.

Mr. Sherpa had no idea that bark stripped from his argeli would one
day turn into pure money -- the outgrowth of an unusual trade in which
one of the poorest pockets of Asia supplies a primary ingredient for
the economy in one of the richest.

ImageShrubs with yellow flowers.
The argeli plant grows wild in the Himalayas. Before Japan began
buying it for currency, its main use in Nepal was for firewood or
fencing.
Image
Employees of Pasang Sherpa, a large argeli grower.

Japan's currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be
sourced at home. The Japanese love their old-fashioned yen notes, and
this year they need mountains of fresh ones, so Mr. Sherpa and his
neighbors have a lucrative reason to hang on to their hillsides.

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