Bank of China's overseas branches were divided between two headquarters after 1949
When the civil war ended, the Bank of China's foreign offices did not all follow one boss. London, Singapore and Hong Kong stayed with the bank run from Beijing, while New York, Tokyo, Havana and Bangkok went with the bank headquartered in Taipei, which later renamed itself.
The bank began as an imperial one. The Qing government opened the Da-Qing Bank in Beijing in 1905, and when the Republic of China was founded in 1912, the finance reformer Chen Jintao reorganised it as the Bank of China. For three decades it issued banknotes for the government as one of four major banks, moved its head office to Shanghai in 1928, and in 1920 opened what became the earliest research office in Chinese banking.
Its global reach came early and under pressure. A London branch opened in 1929 to handle the government's foreign debt and trade, followed by Osaka, Singapore and a New York agency. When Japanese forces blockaded China's ports in 1937, the bank spread across Southeast and South Asia, from Batavia and Rangoon to Bombay and Calcutta, to gather remittances from overseas Chinese and move military supplies. Japan's conquests in 1941 and 1942 shut nearly all of those offices, yet in 1942 the bank still opened new ones as far afield as Sydney, Liverpool and Havana. That same July it lost the right to issue currency, which passed exclusively to the Central Bank of China.
After the 1949 revolution, most mainland operations were folded into the People's Bank of China, and the Taipei-based bank became the International Commercial Bank of China in 1971. Other branches vanished through nationalisation, in Burma in 1963 and in Saigon and Phnom Penh in 1975. Beijing re-established the Bank of China in 1979 as its specialist in international finance, opening in Luxembourg that year and New York in 1981.
A 2006 share sale in Hong Kong raised about 11.2 billion dollars including extra shares, then one of the largest IPOs ever. Branches now reach every inhabited continent, yet by 2017 business outside China made up under 4 percent of its profits and assets.
Source: Bank of China
