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1 Cent - The Sun Co. Ltd. Shanghai
| Issuer | The Sun Co. (S'Hai) Ltd. |
|---|---|
| Year | 1933-1941 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | 98 x 54 mm |
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| Obverse description | Red letterpress on cream paper with a floral guilloche border and quatrefoil corner ornaments. A central rectangular cartouche bears the issuer name and denomination in traditional Chinese characters, with a small vignette at left. Two square official seals are applied in violet ink at lower left. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | 1 THE SUN CO. (S'HAI) LTD. CREDIT COUPON ONE CENT 1 ONE CENT |
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| Comments |
The Sun Company was a department store — one of Shanghai's four great emporiums of the Republican era, all of them foreign-capital ventures competing for the International Settlement's consumer trade. This chit was not issued by any bank or municipal authority but by the store itself, functioning as a fractional token for small transactions at a time when genuine copper and bronze coinage was chronically short in the Shanghai retail economy.
Private merchant scrip of this kind occupied a legal grey zone throughout the 1930s. It circulated, but only within a limited commercial radius, and redemption depended entirely on the issuer remaining solvent — which, after 1941, the Japanese occupation made moot.