100 Piastres

The Banque de l'Indochine's 100 Piastres series was printed by the Imprimerie de la Banque de France — a relationship that gave the colonial issuer access to some of the finest intaglio work produced anywhere in the world at the time. Bramtot was a Prix de Rome winner whose allegorical work appeared frequently on French state commissions; his involvement here was not unusual, but it elevated the note considerably above typical colonial paper of the period.

The piastre at this date was pegged to silver, and the 1903–1907 window covers a period of genuine monetary instability as France debated whether to shift Indochinese currency toward a gold-exchange standard — a transition that eventually came in 1930.