10 Mil Réis Thesouro Nacional, 1st print

Brazil's National Treasury turned to Perkins, Bacon & Petch in London for this 1835 emission because the firm had already established itself as the preeminent source of security printing for newly independent states — the same intaglio steel-engraving techniques Jacob Perkins had pioneered in the United States before relocating to England in 1819. The choice was political as much as practical: domestically printed currency would have carried little public confidence in a country still consolidating independence from Portugal.

As the first print of the series, this emission predates the significant monetary turbulence Brazil would face in the 1840s and 1850s, when competing note issuers and successive banking crises eroded trust in paper currency across the empire.