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100 Francs ovpt. on 50 Piastres
| Issuer | Banque de l'Indochine |
|---|---|
| Year | 1943 |
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| Printer | American Bank Note Company, New York, United States |
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| Obverse description | Green intaglio note overprinted on a French Indochina 50 Piastres issue (P#77), with a vignette of a man wearing a straw hat and carrying baskets at right. The overprint introduces the denomination 100 Francs and the place name Tahiti, with printed facsimile signatures and a penal code warning legend. The overall underprint and design elements remain those of the original Indochina issue. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Printed in green, the reverse carries a central vignette reproducing a processional frieze of Apsara dancers derived from the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, rendered in fine intaglio engraving across the full width of the note. Chinese characters reading 東方匯理銀行 (Banque de l'Indochine) appear at left, with Khmer script at lower right. The border consists of a repeated guilloche pattern with ornamental corner medallions. |
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| Comments |
The Free French administration in exile needed currency for territories it hoped to reclaim or hold, but wartime logistics made fresh designs impractical. This note was a stopgap: existing Banque de l'Indochine 50 Piastres stock, printed by ABNC before the fall of French Indochina, overprinted with a new denomination in francs to serve a different monetary geography entirely — the French Pacific and Indian Ocean possessions rather than Southeast Asia.
The franc overprint on a piastres base is not a clerical curiosity. It reflects exactly how fractured Free French currency arrangements had become by 1943, with denomination, territory, and issuing authority no longer mapping cleanly onto one another.