Hell Notes are fanciful, fake odd-denomination bills that are burned at Chinese festivals and tossed out at funerals. BigWhiteGuy has a lovely essay and gallery of scanned-in Hell Notes.
(Thanks, Albert!)
Update: Dominic sez, "there's a very entertaining story by M.K. Hobson in SciFi.com's Fiction archive by the name of 'Hell Notes'. It's about a Chinese restaurant that caters to the dead who pay, of course, in Hell Notes."
Update 2: Alvin sez, "Today – April 5, HK time – happens to be the Qing Ming festival, the public holiday when families visit cemetaries to pay their respects. Burnt offerings don't end with money – entire paper-and-cardboard houses, cars (Mercedes seem especially popular), clothes – even laptop computers are burned in traditional funerals as offerings to the dead. Unfortunately I can't send along photos as 1) I don't have any and 2) there's some degree of superstition surrounding keeping (and, I suspect, photographing) them."
Update 3: Derryl sez, "don't forget that Maureen McHugh also wrote a similar story, which won the World Fantasy Award, called 'Ancestor Money.'"
Update 4: Yimay Yang sez,
I just got back from a visit to Taiwan and my family visited a lot of relatives' graves and burned a lot of money and paper houses. I have a few photos on Flickr and attached more photos on the paper house including a car, motorcycle and friends that we burned for my uncle who recently passed.
Update 5: Weizhong Yang sez, "I would like to tell you a joke about this tradition.
It happened about half year ago in Taiwan. An grandfather
heard about there was a famous Taiwanese star published her
new album, then he asked his grandson to buy a copy. His
grandson had buy a compact disk and he thought that he did
not need to buy another one, he could just use his compact
disk recorder to copy this album to another writable disk.
Then the grandson told his grandfather, 'Well, I will burn a
copy for you.' The grandfather felt extraordinary angry,
because in his mind, 'burning something for him' means
cursing him to go to hell!"
