100 Patacas Banco Nacional Ultramarino

Banco Nacional Ultramarino's Macau branch had been issuing currency since the 1890s, but the 1945 series came at a particularly fraught moment — Japan's occupation of neighbouring Hong Kong and its effective encirclement of the Portuguese enclave throughout the war years had severely disrupted normal banking activity. Macau's nominal neutrality kept it outside direct occupation, but trade was strangled and the local economy ran largely on black market exchange and refugee commerce.

Waterlow & Sons produced the plates in London, which would have been physically impossible to deliver during the war itself. Whether these were printed from pre-war plates held in London and shipped post-liberation, or struck during the war for delayed shipment, the 1945 date places them squarely in the uncertain window between Japanese regional dominance and the resumption of normal colonial administration.