1 Cent Pattern

By 1943, the Japanese occupation had severed French Indochina from its normal metal supply chains almost entirely. The colonial administration experimented with aluminium for subsidiary coinage as copper and zinc were increasingly requisitioned for the war effort. These pattern pieces — referenced under Lec#109b and 109c — represent trial strikes that never advanced to full production, leaving mintage figures effectively unknowable and surviving examples confined almost exclusively to specialist collections.