50 Yuan Bank of Pei Hai

The Bank of Pei Hai was the currency authority of the Shandong-Jiangsu-Hebei border region under Communist Party control, and by 1945 it was issuing notes specifically to finance the final push against Japanese forces and — simultaneously — to position the Party economically ahead of the coming civil war with the Nationalists. These weren't peacetime banking instruments. They were instruments of administered regional control, accepted by decree within liberated zones and worthless outside them.

The S-prefix in the Pick reference signals this is a specialty or regional issue, and collectors frequently encounter notes from this series with significant variation in paper quality owing to wartime supply constraints on printing materials in the Shandong base areas.