1 Bastardo - João III

The bastardo was one of several fractional denominations struck by the Portuguese at Malacca after Afonso de Albuquerque seized the port in 1511, integrating the mint into a colonial monetary system designed to displace the local tin coinage that had circulated there for generations. Calin — a local tin-lead alloy — was the only practical choice; it was what the Malay economy ran on, and Portuguese administrators understood that forcing a foreign metal on the spice trade's central entrepôt would have been commercially ruinous.

The name bastardo itself signals ambiguity: neither a clean fraction nor a round value, it occupied an awkward middle position in the Portuguese colonial tariff schedule.