500 Yuan Central Bank of China

The 500 Yuan notes of 1945 belong to the inflationary acceleration that followed Japan's surrender — a moment when victory paradoxically made the Nationalist currency crisis worse, not better. The returning Nationalist government absorbed enormous quantities of Japanese puppet-regime scrip at artificially fixed exchange rates, flooding the money supply and pushing the Central Bank to issue denominations that would have seemed absurd just years earlier.

The Central Bank of China Printing Works was printing under severe resource strain by this point, and the P#284 series shows it — registration inconsistencies and ink variation are common across surviving examples, not signs of individual damage.