![People working outdoors in a hilly area, performing some kind of labor involving plants stretched out across wooden benches.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/04/11/multimedia/00nepal-yen-01-mlkp/00nepal-yen-01-mlkp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
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.
Supported by
Bhadra Sharma and
Bhadra Sharma reported from Kathmandu and Puwamajhuwa village in Nepal, and Alex Travelli from New Delhi.
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.
![Shrubs with yellow flowers.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/04/11/multimedia/00nepal-yen-02-mlkp/00nepal-yen-02-mlkp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
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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