1 Escudo

The Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese colonial finance — chartered not as a central bank in the metropolitan sense, but as a private institution empowered to issue currency across multiple overseas territories simultaneously. This particular note belongs to the Angolan series, though the BNU's plate designs circulated with minimal modification across different colonial emissions, which occasionally creates attribution headaches for collectors working from design alone.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced high-quality intaglio work throughout this period, and their contracts with Portuguese colonial issuers were long-running. The 1 Escudo denomination was essentially a workhorse note — low enough in value to see heavy daily use, which makes genuinely uncirculated survivors harder to locate than the pick number's relative familiarity might suggest.