5000 Customs Gold Units

The Customs Gold Unit — Haikwan Liang in older parlance — was a notional accounting unit originally used to calculate import duties, revived in 1930 as a managed currency peg intended to stabilize trade revenues against silver fluctuations. By 1947, when this 5000-unit note was issued, the peg had long since collapsed under wartime fiscal pressure, and the denomination itself signals how badly the broader Nationalist monetary system had deteriorated.

The Central Printing Factory was the Republic of China's primary state press, responsible for an enormous volume of emergency-issue paper through the late 1940s. Notes from this period frequently show uneven ink distribution and variable registration, not as defects but as the expected output of a facility printing under impossible demand.