10 Yuan

This note belongs to the first series of Renminbi, issued in the chaotic final months of the civil war as Communist forces consolidated territory faster than a coherent banking infrastructure could follow. The People's Bank of China had been formally established only in December 1948, and the early first-series notes were printed by multiple regional facilities under widely varying conditions — which is precisely why paper quality, ink saturation, and registration consistency differ so markedly across surviving examples of even the same denomination and design.

First-series RMB was demonetized in 1955 and exchanged at 10,000 old yuan to one new yuan, giving holders little incentive to preserve low-denomination notes.