Food Stamp Kai County, Sichuan

Kai County — now Kaixian — was submerged by the Three Gorges Reservoir in the early 2000s, making its local administrative scrip among the more geographically specific casualties of that resettlement. The Grain Bureau issued these food stamps as part of the rationing apparatus that China was already dismantling nationally; the urban grain ration system was formally abolished in 1993, but rural and county-level bureaus continued issuing supplementary stamps well into the late 1990s as the transition lagged behind policy.

This is almost certainly a late survival of a dying system rather than routine issue.