100 Patacas Banco Nacional Ultramarino

The Banco Nacional Ultramarino held the note-issuing privilege for Portuguese Macau throughout the colonial period, and the 1950 series represents the postwar consolidation of that arrangement — the pre-war issues had been seriously disrupted by the Japanese occupation of neighboring Hong Kong and the general instability of the Pearl River Delta during the 1940s. Macau itself remained technically neutral under Portuguese administration, but currency confidence was badly shaken and restoring orderly circulation required deliberate effort.

Waterlow & Sons printed this series before the firm's catastrophic 1961 liquidation, itself precipitated by the fallout from the famous 1925 Portuguese banknote scandal — an earlier Waterlow contract that had gone very badly wrong.