1000 Yuan Central Bank of China

The 1945 date places this note in the final stretch of the Second Sino-Japanese War, when the Central Bank of China was printing enormous volumes of currency to cover wartime expenditure. Inflation was already catastrophic by this point — the money supply had expanded roughly 300-fold since 1937 — and the 1000 Yuan denomination, which would have seemed extraordinary in peacetime, was already struggling to hold practical purchasing power by the time it reached circulation.

The Central Bank of China Printing Works had been relocated inland to Chongqing during the Japanese advance, a logistical disruption that affected paper quality and production consistency across the mid-1940s series.