The company did not say whether it should pay bondholders in cash or other assets. In a regulatory filing, Henda said she “negotiated a resolution by off-market means” regarding coupon payments for onshore bonds.

Evergrande, which has struggled to raise funds since July after the liquidity crunch worsened over the summer, has paid some contractors and building material suppliers for unfinished apartments.

Evergrande also made a coupon payment of $ 83.5 million on U.S. dollar bonds on Thursday and did not disclose if he plans to pay that. The Hong Kong market, where Evergrande is listed, closed Wednesday due to the Mid-Autumn Festival.

“We expect Evergrande’s land investors to be a priority,” said Sandra Chow, co-lead of the Asia-Pacific study at CreditSights in Singapore.

Based in Shenzhen, with housing developments in all states of China, Evergrande is on the verge of collapse after years of aggressive borrowing and expansion. Falling contract sales, delayed asset disposal plans and restraint in Beijing’s real estate industry are all contributing to the cash flow crisis. The company hired a financial advisor last week and said it may consider a restructuring.

The company is one of the largest issuers of high yield bonds in Asia. We have also borrowed a lot of money from banks and investors in mainland China and have issued many short term IOUs called commercial buildings to our suppliers and contractors. At the end of June, Evergrande’s debt stood at $ 304 billion, including $ 88 billion in interest-bearing debt.

Investors and major credit rating agencies around the world are hopeful that the company will default and materialize losses on offshore bonds. Some of Evergrande’s dollar bonds have recently traded at a very appalling price of around 25 cents on the dollar.

If Evergrande misses the interest payment on the dollar bonds on Thursday, the company has a 30-day grace period to provide that money.

Investors are watching Evergrande closely and fear that a business failure could create transmission risks and cause problems in financial markets.

So far, these risks have been largely contained outside the high yield bond market of other Chinese leveraged real estate developers whose prices are falling.

The mainland Chinese stock exchange reopened on Wednesday after a two-day vacation. The CSI300 index, which tracks the 300 largest publicly traded stocks on earth, fell 0.7%, while the real estate stock index rose 2.4%.

Since last Friday, the People’s Bank of China has put $ 43.3 billion net into the domestic repo market, and many banks are relying on short-term funding. Kelvin Wong, market analyst at CMC Markets in Singapore, said the central bank “is watching closely for signs of transmission from the ongoing Evergrande crisis.”

Hui Ka Yan, founder and chairman of Evergrande, has resigned as chairman of Hengda, which accounts for the majority of the group’s results. Earlier this week, Hui told Evergrande employees he hoped developers would emerge from what he called the “darkest moment” soon.

—SerenaNg contributed to this article.

Write to Clarence Leong ([email protected]) and Yifan Wang ([email protected])