Help Identifying Chinese Variant

It's my understanding that a very large number of these October 1, 1914 Bank of Communications notes were printed and that they circulated for more than 30 years.

In the beginning, the notes carried the signatures of the local or regional bank officers.

Many of these notes were subsequently issued during the early years of World War II and these carried the signatures of the national bank officers.

While the signatures appear to be handwritten, they are actually printed.

The Shanghai and Tientsin notes apparently have the most varieties of these signatures.

I am not aware of any reference that documents all of these varieties.

Gary

Frankly, my knowledge of Chinese notes is fairly limited.

My main interest in regard to Chinese notes has to do with the meaning of the vignettes which I write about in Chinese Paper Money.

I believe SCWPM (which I do not have) is based on Smith and Matravers.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend other books to you because almost all of my reference books are in Chinese. They would not be helpful to you unless you can read Chinese.

Without doing additional research on who were the Bank of Communications officials during the war, I would not be able to tell you which notes are from this time period.

Yes, the later notes were legally issued by the government. The government was printing tremendous amounts of paper currency during the period.

This caused very severe inflation.

As to how severe the inflation was, you may find my blog post "Carrying Cash in Republican China" enlightening.

Gary

So just an update if anybody is interested. I got my Smith and Matravers book and these varieties were in there. Pretty cool really. The two with the Chinese signatures were released in 1914 and are more rare than the others.