1 Cent Honquan plantations

Plantation scrip from French Indochina occupies a peculiar category — technically private currency, issued by agricultural concessions to bind workers to the company store and avoid the inconvenience of circulating coinage reaching laborer hands. The Société des Plantations de Honquan operated rubber holdings in Cochinchina, and this centième token represents exactly that system: wages paid partly in scrip redeemable only on-plantation, a mechanism that regulators in Paris periodically threatened to suppress but never effectively did.

Printed locally by C. Ardin & Fils of Saigon, the note never entered general commerce by design.