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2500 Customs Gold Units
| Issuer | Central Bank of China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1947 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 2500 Customs Gold Units (2500 關金圓) |
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| Obverse description | Central portrait vignette of Sun Yat-sen within an oval guilloche frame, printed in dark olive-brown intaglio on a pale guilloche underprint. Two red seal impressions appear below the portrait, flanked by ornate scrollwork borders. The denomination in Chinese characters is displayed centrally beneath the portrait, with the serial number printed in red above and below the design. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | 行銀央中 金關 貳 仟 伍 佰 圓 印年六十三國民華中 司公限有局書華中 (Translation: Central Bank of China Two Thousand Five Hundred Customs Gold Units Printed in the 36th year of the Republic of China Chung Hwa Book Co. Ltd.) |
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| Comments |
The Customs Gold Unit —關金券 (Guānjīn quàn) — was originally introduced in 1930 as a bookkeeping currency for calculating import tariffs, pegged to the U.S. dollar at a fixed rate. By 1947, that fiction had long collapsed. Runaway inflation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and its aftermath forced the Central Bank to issue increasingly large denominations, and the 2500-unit note is a direct artifact of that spiral — a denomination that would have been unimaginable when the series began.
Chung Hwa Book Co. was one of the principal security printers for the Nationalist government throughout this period, operating out of Shanghai under increasingly difficult conditions as hyperinflation made each new print run obsolete almost before distribution.