A man in east China's Jiangxi province was "luckily" enough on Wednesday to discover from his home some 850,000 yuan old cash that was issued before the founding of New China of 1949. But shortly after that he became disappointed just to find out these notes could nowhere else be used any longer and are now not worthy of a bag of rice.

Mr. Zhu, who lives in the capital city of Nanchang, discovered the old money inside his old house, which included nine banknotes, Jiangnan City Daily reported on Thursday. The bounty included one 500,000 denomination note, two 100,000 notes, three 50,000 notes, two 20 notes and one 10 yuan note.

Zhu was overjoyed at first but soon realised that the bills were "Gold Yuan", issued by the Koumingtang regime back in 1948 and early 1949, when the short-lived currency suffered a rocketing hyper-inflation.

According to Zhu, he had a distant relative who used to be a highranking official of the then KMT regime. Before his death, the man presented over 10 million gold yuans to Zhu's father.

Gold yuan's highest denomination then was 10 milllion. With the founding of the People's Republic of China in Oct. 1949, most gold yuans were exchanged to Chinese RMB yuan at a rate of 100,000:1. The replaced old money was then destroyed by the Chinese government.

According to a finance expert, the 850,000 old cash notes currently do not equal even half a kilogram of rice, thus the money is only valuable as a personal souvenir.