The Chinese republic’s fractional coinage had been revamped in 1936 with a nickel 20-fen piece being installed as its high-value. (A somewhat mysterious 50-fen piece is alleged to have been coined at the San Francisco mint about that time, in silver, but the 6,480,000 pieces that have been reported seem to be…well, missing.) At any rate, the 1942 debut of this ½-yuan (or 50-fen) denomination represents something of a last stand for the WWII coinage of the Chinese republic, and was coined about the time the usual wartime inflation became a disastrous wartime inflation.
A 50-fen piece like this one, had it been introduced in ’36 as a part of the general reform of China’s minor coinage, would have bought a Shanghai rickshaw ride. By the time this coin actually appeared, however, it was a very different story. Britain and the United States had been attacked by the Japanese and the privileged, somewhat surreal existence of Shanghai’s “foreign enclave” was at an end. (By late 1942, that same rickshaw ride cost something like 400 yuan, or about 800-times as much.)
It isn’t surprising, then, that this new ½-yuan coin would be short-lived, lasting only this year and the next. The 1943 50-fen would be coined in much smaller numbers (4,000,000) than this ’42 (57,000,000).
And it was the end. The inflation was so fast-moving that coins had been overtaken; only paper money had a chance of moving that fast.
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