10 Yuan Tung Pei Bank of China, brown

The Tung Pei Bank of China — literally the Northeast Bank — was established by the Chinese Communist Party in 1945 to assert financial control over Manchuria following the Soviet expulsion of Japanese forces. This note belongs to the earliest emission period, when the bank was still consolidating authority across a region whose existing currency infrastructure had been built around Japanese military scrip and Manchukuo yuan. The immediate task was replacement, not gradual transition.

Pick S3729 falls within a series where printing quality and paper stock varied considerably between batches, a consequence of using whatever facilities were available in newly captured territory rather than a dedicated security printer.