1/2 Fueang - Rama IV

Rama IV — Mongkut — authorized Western-style struck coinage in the late 1850s partly to satisfy treaty obligations with Britain following the Bowring Treaty of 1855, which opened Siam to foreign trade and exposed the old bullet-money system to international ridicule. The Paris Mint produced the dies and early machinery. This denomination sits at the bottom of a decimal-adjacent system Mongkut imposed to rationalize Siamese currency, though traditional tical-based accounting persisted in markets for decades afterward.