The gold yuan hoax was Chiang's parting shot at history. Five months after the gold yuan was introduced at an artificial exchange rate of four gold yuan to one U.S. dollar, the rate plummeted to one million to one. After that it went crazy.
The people who suffered most were those earnest souls who somehow managed to save one or two thousand U.S. dollars' worth of gold in the course of a lifetime, and obeyed Chiang's orders and brought it to government banks on the prescribed day to trade for gold yuans. When their gold yuans became worthless overnight, they could be seen sitting in teashops in Shanghai or Hankow or Canton, in a state of shock, abandoned by the Kuomintang, certain to be persecuted as capitalists by the Communists, sitting there without even enough coppers to spirit the wife and children out of the country to Macao or Hong Kong before the roof caved in. They were the last of Chiang's constituents.