1 Cent - The Sun Co. Ltd. Shanghai

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.