200 Yuan Bank of Chinan

The Bank of Chinan (齊南銀行) was a Japanese-sponsored puppet institution operating in occupied Shandong province. Its notes were instruments of wartime economic extraction — designed to displace legal tender and fund Japanese military operations in North China through controlled inflation rather than direct taxation.

The 200 Yuan denomination is among the higher values in this series, issued as inflation eroded the purchasing power of smaller notes. Pick S3078 is catalogued under the Chinese provincial and commercial section precisely because these puppet bank issues occupy an awkward classification — neither fully military scrip nor conventional commercial paper.

Surviving examples tend to show heavy fold wear; these notes circulated under duress in a wartime occupied zone, not in peacetime commerce.