1000 Yuan Bank of China

The Bank of China was one of four government-affiliated banks operating in Nationalist China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and by 1942 it was operating under increasingly constrained conditions as Japanese forces controlled much of the eastern seaboard. Having plates printed by the American Bank Note Company in New York was not unusual for Chinese institutions — ABNC had handled Chinese government printing contracts for decades — but the logistics of getting finished notes from New York to Free China by 1942 were genuinely complicated, with Pacific shipping routes effectively closed after Pearl Harbor.

The 1000 Yuan denomination reflects the inflation already accelerating through the wartime Nationalist economy, a spiral that would eventually render such notes nearly worthless by the late 1940s.