1000 Customs Gold Units

The Customs Gold Unit was a notional currency introduced by the Nationalist government in 1930 to stabilize customs duty collection, which had been eroded by inflation eating into silver-based revenue. By 1947, when this note was issued, the CGU had long since become a fiction — the underlying gold reserves it nominally represented were largely exhausted, and the Nationalist regime was financing the civil war through money creation on a catastrophic scale.

Chung Hwa Book Co. was primarily a commercial publisher pressed into banknote production as demand outpaced the capacity of dedicated security printers. The 1947 high-denomination issues were obsolete within months as hyperinflation rendered four-digit CGU notes effectively worthless before they could circulate meaningfully.