10 Soles

Issued during one of the worst years in Peruvian financial history, this note appeared as the War of the Pacific was beginning — Chile declared war on Peru in April 1879, and the fiscal emission board that issued this series was itself a wartime administrative improvisation rather than a standing institution. The Junta Administradora was created specifically to manage emergency paper currency as silver coinage disappeared from circulation under wartime pressure.

ABNC's involvement is notable: the plates were contracted before hostilities fully disrupted transatlantic commerce, and the printing was completed in New York with the watermarked security paper typical of the company's South American commissions of that decade. Chilean forces occupied Lima in January 1881, and much of the currency infrastructure these notes supported simply ceased to function shortly after.