Chinese Food Coupons : Intro 0 a

There are thousands ... the Chinese Food (and other) coupons that were issued mainly between 1960 an 1990.
Many of us have (seen) them, but if you're not a native chinese speaker, it's difficult to distiniguish them.

Chinese 'Food' coupons

In 1955, a ration system started in China P.R., when commodities were scarce, until in 1990, when there was a substantional growth of industrial and agricultural production. The coupons where introduced to stabilize the grain market and to balance demand and supply.
If you were wealthy, or poor, you could not buy more meat, grain, ... without the coupons.
There was a limited amount of grain for men*, and for women*.
Although we know the coupons now as 'food coupons' there were coupons for all kinds of foods, fuel, but also bicycles, cigarettes, televisions ... Without a coupon, you were not allowed to purchase those goods.

* the average ration for men was 15 kilograms each month, and 13 kilograms for women.

In this set of posts, I will try to give an idea of the numerous coupons that were issued, and how to sort them out.

some coupons and their characteristics

Without going too much in details, there are - in general - four things to look for on the coupons:

1 (light green):
City or Province the coupons were issued for.
There are 32 different institutes that provided the coupons!
In the following articles, I will go deeper into this subject

2 (dark green):
The year the coupon was issued - this can be in arabic numbers or chinese numbers
There are different ways to write chinese numbers :

chinese numbering system

For the date on the coupons, you have to look at the column with Lower case-writing.

3 (light blue):
The amount in items, grams, or quantities are in Upper case numbers.
Sometimes arabic numbers are also used to indicate the amounts, sometimes in both writings

4 (purple):
The unit (grams, quantities, ....) is written behind the amount.
Some of those units are used very frequently.

Some of those coupons were general coupons, other only local, some were also issued for military only.

to be continued ....