100 000 Cruzeiros 2nd Edition, 3rd Type

The 100,000 Cruzeiros denomination itself tells the story of Brazilian monetary policy in the early 1980s — inflation was running above 200% annually by 1984, forcing the Banco Central to push note values into six-figure territory before the Cruzado reform of 1986 wiped the slate clean with a 1,000-to-1 redenomination. This is among the last issues of that doomed currency.

Czesław Słania's involvement on the obverse is the real point of distinction here. The Polish-Swedish master engraver — credited with over a thousand stamp engravings and regarded as the finest intaglio portraitist of the twentieth century — worked on remarkably few banknotes, making his presence in a Brazilian domestic issue genuinely unusual.