Garden of Everything

a miracle without a revelation a saint with a vengeance

details and references under the cut

i think i finally found a satisfying (to me) answer to the question that's been eating at me since sunday: why was the auction held in yuan?

i've seen some speculations that the auction was held in china, and i admit that was my first instinct as well, but it still felt off to me. tonight i finally turned on my day job brain during my 3rd rewatch and realized the IMF freezing lestat's account could actually be the missing piece here.

so the larger background one needs know is that we live in a US dollar-centered world, and renminbi (RMB) or yuan is the only large, stable non-western currency that has the scale and mature enough infrastructure (e.g. cross-border payment system) to handle high volumes of transactions outside of the dollar-centered financial system. this is also why many russian oligarchs began transacting in yuan after being sanctioned by the US and the EU after the russian invasion of ukraine. and before you mention cryptocurrencies, yes, those are also included in sanctions these days.

despite what lestat said, the IMF doesn't really freeze accounts (it's just not their job) but we're talking about the aftermath of a planet-wide catastrophic event in a fictional vampire show so who knows! or maybe lestat just didn't really understand how "finance" works (which would be on brand tbh). ANYWAY, my guess is that by the time he was recording "the failures", he got sanctioned by the UN due to his connection to war-crime-goddess-akasha, so now all his assets that move through the mainstream monetary system are frozen. the large majority of the global financial structures are highly interconnected, so no matter if you're trading in dollars, euros, or yen, it's pretty much impossible for a sanctioned individual to move value without triggering alarm at some point. the RMB financial architecture, however, is much more opaque and the transactions are much less detectable to international financial authorities. and let's just say, historically, they've also given less fuck about UN sanctions...

so, the reason the bidding was conducted in yuan could be:

(in order of increasingly wilder speculations)

one of the many measures taken to protect the overall anonymity of the auction;

so that lestat could actually receive and use the proceeds from the sale undetected bc he was actually the secret seller and now without access to his usual assets;