½ Liang - Cooking Oil Stamp Wuhan City, Hubei

China's post-Mao rationing system generated thousands of local commodity coupons — grain, cotton, coal, edible oil — and this Wuhan issue is a product of that bureaucratic infrastructure still running at full capacity in 1980, three years into the Reform era but years before market liberalization made such instruments redundant. Cooking oil remained strictly rationed in most Chinese cities until well into the 1980s, with per-household allocations tracked through exactly these kinds of local scrip booklets.

The half-liang denomination — roughly 25 grams of oil — reflects the granularity of household rationing at the time. Wuhan administered its own coupons independently of provincial-level issues, which is why municipal examples from this period survive in such variety.