During the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, foreign banks were a major presence within the Chinese banking sector. They financed China’s rapidly growing foreign trade, issued their own currencies and provided loans to the Chinese government that allowed China to finance wars, fund industrialisation projects and maintain political stability. However, these banks have previously either been neglected by the existing scholarship or simply viewed as another manifestation of Western imperialism. By following the history of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB, Chinese: 德華銀行) – the main German bank active in China between the 1890s and the First World War – my current research project aims to address this gap in the historiography. My study explores how the interaction between German and other foreign bankers and Chinese officials, bankers and merchants led to the rapid internationalisation of Chinese state finance and the Chinese banking sector on the China coast. I argue that foreign banks were not simply another form of imperialism but acted as nodes within the emerging global network of capital flows and provided the financial infrastructure that made modern economic globalisation in China possible. Moreover, I suggest that an understanding of China’s historical experience with foreign banks and financial internationalisation can also help us comprehend the country’s current engagement with global financial markets, public debt and foreign businesses.