50 Yuan Bank of Shansi, Chahar, & Hopei

The Bank of Shansi, Chahar & Hopei was a Japanese-sponsored regional bank established to administer currency in the occupied territories of North China. Its notes circulated in an economy deliberately separated from Nationalist-controlled regions — the Japanese military used these instruments to extract resources and suppress competing currencies, including the older provincial issues and Nationalist fabi.

By 1943 the bank was producing high-denomination notes to keep pace with wartime inflation that its own monetary policies had helped create. The S3161 is one of the scarcer issues in this series; survival rates are lower than for the smaller denominations, which circulated more widely and survived in greater numbers simply through volume.