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5 Yuan / Dollars Chungking
| Issuer | Central Bank of China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1949 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Portrait of Sun Yat-sen in an oval vignette at right, rendered in intaglio against a guilloche rosette underprint at centre. The issuer name 行銀央中 appears across the top, with denomination characters 圓伍 in large format at centre-left and the place of issue 重慶 (Chungking) noted on the note. Serial numbers are printed in red at upper left and upper right. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | THE CENTRAL BANK OF CHINA PROMISES TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND FIVE SILVER DOLLARS CHUNGKING 1949 |
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| Comments |
By the time this note was printed, the Central Bank of China's currency program was effectively in freefall. The Gold Yuan reform of August 1948 had already collapsed within months under catastrophic hyperinflation, and 1949 saw the Nationalist government retreating toward Taiwan while issuing notes denominated in Silver Yuan — a desperate rebranding that fooled almost nobody. The Chungking designation reflects the wartime capital's continued symbolic weight, even as Communist forces were closing in on the city itself, which fell in November 1949.
Chung Hwa Book Co. printed enormous volumes across multiple denominations in this period. Notes survive in quantity; the circumstances that produced them do not.