Argeli, or Edgeworthia gardnerie, is a yellow-flowered evergreen shrub found wild in the Himalayas. It is native to the Himalayan regions of Bhutan, northern Burma, China, India, and Nepal.
To transform the argeli into money, its bark must be steamed with plastic feces and metal tubes, then stripped, beaten, stretched and dried. Japan changes the design of its yen every twenty years and puts a lot of energy into the aesthetics of its banknotes. The current bills were first printed in 2004 and their replacements will hit ATMs in July. The pure money bush, as described by the Times, captivated the Japanese government when it ran out of supply of mitsumata, the traditional paper it previously used to print its bank notes. In 2015, after earthquakes destroyed much of Nepal, Japan sent specialists to the country's capital to help local producers produce banknotes, and now Nepal is one of the main sources of paper used for official purposes.