500 Yuan Bank of Pei Hai

The Bank of Pei Hai was a Communist-controlled regional bank operating in the Shandong-Bohai border region, and by 1947 it was printing currency to finance the People's Liberation Army's campaigns during the civil war against the Nationalists. Notes from this period circulated in territory that changed hands repeatedly, which meant many were collected as war spoils, confiscated, or deliberately withdrawn when liberated zones consolidated under a single currency regime ahead of the 1948 establishment of the People's Bank of China.

Survival rates are uneven across the Pei Hai series — some denominations were overprinted for reuse, others simply pulled. The S3620C designation places this within a large and varied pick sequence that reflects just how many local emissions the bank produced across different print runs and regional branches.