10 Yuan Central Bank of China

The Central Bank of China placed enormous reliance on foreign printers throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War, and Waterlow & Sons was a primary supplier during the period when domestic Chinese printing capacity was under serious pressure from Japanese advances. By 1941, the Nationalist government had retreated to Chongqing, and much of its currency production depended on London, New York, and other overseas facilities — notes printed abroad and then shipped into a country at war.

Waterlow had a long track record with Chinese currency contracts, though their name appears in one of numismatics' more notorious episodes: the 1925 Portuguese escudo forgery scandal, in which a rogue client exploited the firm's own plates. No comparable incident touched the Chinese contracts, but the firm's internal controls were thereafter considerably tighter.