1 Cent Provincial Bank of Kweichow

The Provincial Bank of Kweichow was one of several regional institutions still issuing notes in 1949 as the Nationalist government's financial apparatus disintegrated. By the time this note was printed at the Central Printing Factory in Chungking, hyperinflation had already rendered gold yuan notes nearly worthless, and provincial scrip of this kind circulated in a monetary environment so chaotic that redemption was essentially theoretical from the outset.

Kweichow province fell to Communist forces later that same year. Notes printed in 1949 by surviving Nationalist provincial banks had extraordinarily short windows of legitimate use — weeks in some cases, not months.