1 Yuan Kelan County Bureau of Finances

Kelan County sits in the mountainous northwest of Shanxi Province, an area that was deeply contested territory during the Second Sino-Japanese War. By 1939 the county was under the administration of the Jin-Sui Border Region, the Nationalist-aligned guerrilla zone controlled by Yan Xishan's forces. Local finance bureaus across this region issued their own small-denomination scrip out of necessity — the currency networks of both the Nationalist government and the occupying Japanese authorities had effectively broken down at the county level, and ordinary transactions needed something workable.

Notes from county-level bureaus in the Jin-Sui region are genuinely scarce. Many were printed on whatever paper was available locally and saw intense circulation before being discarded or destroyed. Kelan issued in very limited quantities, and surviving examples from 1939 are rarely encountered outside Chinese specialist collections.