5 Fen Federal Reserve Bank, Peking

The Federal Reserve Bank of China was not a central bank in any conventional sense — it was a Japanese-controlled institution established in 1938 to administer currency in the occupied territories of North China. By 1941, Japan was pushing to replace circulating silver coinage with base metal issues to redirect silver into the war economy. This piece, catalogued as a pattern, almost certainly never reached circulation; the silver small-denomination experiments were abandoned in favor of the aluminum and cupro-nickel issues that actually flooded the occupation zone.

The Peking attribution distinguishes it from the bank's other mint operations. Surviving examples are rare by any measure — pattern issues from puppet-state institutions were neither preserved systematically nor collected openly during the occupation period.