1 Yuan Soviet Red Army

Issued by Soviet occupation forces following the rapid August 1945 campaign against Japanese-held Manchuria, these military yuan notes were printed in the USSR and introduced alongside similar issues for use in other occupied territories. The Soviet command issued them as a parallel currency, effectively extracting local goods and resources without drawing on hard currency reserves — a standard Soviet occupation monetary tactic also applied in northern Korea, Sakhalin, and parts of Germany at roughly the same time.

Chinese Nationalist authorities refused to recognize the notes, and after Soviet withdrawal they became worthless. Survivor quantities are decent; the real scarcity is in consecutively numbered pairs.