1/2 Gulden Treasury Note

The Topographische Inrichting — the colonial topographic survey office in Batavia — was an unusual choice for currency printing, but the Dutch East Indies administration relied on local production capacity during the years when war and its aftermath disrupted normal supply chains from the Netherlands. The half-gulden denomination in paper was itself a concession to coin shortages; silver fractional coins were being hoarded well into the early 1920s.

P#102 is one of the more modestly produced notes in the NEI series — local press, small format, low face value. Condition tends to suffer from tropical humidity, and paper quality from the Batavia-printed issues generally lags behind the Amsterdam-produced contemporaries.