50 000 Customs Gold Units

The Customs Gold Unit (CGU) was a notional accounting currency the Chinese Nationalist government created in 1930 to collect maritime customs duties, pegged initially to the gold-based U.S. dollar at a fixed rate. By 1948, with hyperinflation consuming the standard fabi at a catastrophic rate, the CGU was briefly monetized as a circulating currency — an attempt to give the public something nominally stable to hold. It failed almost immediately.

The 50,000 CGU denomination is itself a symptom: denominations of this size appeared within months of the series launching, as the parallel Gold Yuan reform also collapsed. The Central Bank's Shanghai printing works was producing emergency runs under conditions of severe institutional breakdown, and the CGU notes were effectively worthless before distribution networks could move them.