1 Jiao / 10 Cents

Kwangtung (Guangdong) maintained its own provincial mint through the warlord period largely because the central government in Beijing never exercised meaningful fiscal control over the south. The province had been striking its own silver since the 1880s under Zhang Zhidong, and that institutional inertia carried straight through the early Republic. This small denomination was the workhorse of daily market transactions in Canton during a decade when the yuan itself was politically contested.