10 Avos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino's small-denomination wartime issues for Macau occupy an odd corner of Portuguese colonial monetary history. By 1940, the territory was technically neutral — Portugal had stayed out of the war — but surrounded by Japanese-occupied China and acutely vulnerable to supply disruption. Low-denomination fractional notes like this one were a practical response to coin shortages, with metal increasingly difficult to source and circulate reliably.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced the plate work in London under conditions that were anything but routine — the firm was printing colonial currency throughout the Blitz period.