1 Shi Jin - Cooking Oil Stamp Shandong Province

Rationing coupons issued by provincial revolutionary committees during the Cultural Revolution occupy an odd space in Chinese notaphily — they are neither banknotes nor purely ephemera, but they functioned as the actual medium of exchange for controlled commodities at a time when centralized distribution had collapsed into regional improvisation. Shandong's revolutionary committee, like its counterparts across the provinces, administered cooking oil allocation independently, producing these stamps in the late 1960s to manage shortages that official statistics of the period simply didn't acknowledge.

The 1969 dating places this squarely within the most chaotic phase of committee governance, before Beijing reasserted tighter control over provincial rationing infrastructure in the early 1970s.