5 Yuan The Chinese Master Artisan

This issue belongs to a long-running People's Bank of China series celebrating traditional Chinese crafts, which has been produced annually since 2012 and has developed a dedicated collector base both domestically and among the Chinese diaspora. The series was partly a policy response to growing state interest in documenting intangible cultural heritage — a UNESCO-recognized category China has pursued aggressively since the mid-2000s.

Mintage figures for this denomination within the series have historically been capped at 30,000 pieces, though official PBC announcements for individual years are inconsistently published through Western reference channels, leaving KM catalog data frequently incomplete at the time of initial listing.