1 Piastre Countermark cancellation perforations

By the early 1930s, French Indochina's piastre was hemorrhaging out of the colony through arbitrage — traders exploiting the gap between the coin's silver bullion value and its face value in local exchange. The colonial administration's response was to cancel circulating stocks with perforation countermarks, rendering the coins legally demonetized while leaving the silver itself intact. It was a bureaucratic solution to a speculative problem.

The multiple Lecompte reference numbers reflect genuine variation in the perforation patterns applied, likely across different administrative districts or cancellation batches rather than a single standardized operation.