5 Yuan Central Bank of China

By 1941 the Central Bank of China had relocated its operations inland to Chongqing following the Japanese advance, yet continued ordering from Thomas De La Rue in London — a logistically complex arrangement sustained through wartime shipping routes. Delivery of finished notes to Free China was genuinely precarious at this stage of the war.

P#236 belongs to a series that saw enormous print runs to compensate for accelerating inflation, itself driven by wartime expenditure and the Japanese military's deliberate flooding of occupied territories with counterfeit Chinese currency to destabilize the economy. The note was effectively obsolete before adequate distribution was possible in some regions.