5 Yuan / Dollars Chungking

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.