10 Cents

This note exists because Japanese occupation had severed French Indochina from metropolitan France, cutting off the usual supply of currency from Paris. The Imprimerie d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi — primarily a government printing office — was pressed into banknote production out of necessity, not design. The result was locally sourced paper, locally cut plates, and a circulation piece that wore out quickly under tropical conditions.

Phạm Ngọc Khuê's involvement as designer is one of the few instances in this series where a Vietnamese national is credited on a French colonial issue. Survivors in any honest circulated grade are harder to find than the catalog frequency implies — the small format and cheap wartime paper combined badly.