Catalog
100 Piastres
| Issuer | Banque de l'Indochine |
|---|---|
| Year | 1947-1954 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Left side vignette of Mercury in classical intaglio style, shown as a bust with winged helmet and caduceus, rendered against a fine guilloche underprint. The denomination '100' appears in large numerals at upper centre, flanked by decorative foliate motifs including oak leaves at right. The issuer's title and denomination inscription occupy a red panel at upper right, with two signature lines and serial number printed in black. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Left portion of the design carries a vignette of two elephants accompanied by a mahout standing beneath palm trees, rendered in warm earth tones. At centre-right, a bust-length portrait of a young Indochinese man is shown in three-quarter view, holding a staff, with a village scene in the background. Multilingual inscriptions in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Khmer scripts appear across the note, with the denomination '100' in a red panel at lower centre. |
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| Comments |
The Banque de l'Indochine's 100 Piastres series issued across this period straddled an increasingly untenable political situation — the First Indochina War began in late 1946, and notes of this denomination were circulating through a territory actively fragmenting into what would become Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The Banque de l'Indochine itself was a private commercial institution chartered in Paris, not a government central bank, which made its continued role as currency issuer during wartime an arrangement of considerable political awkwardness.
Gaspérini's engraving work for the Banque de France was consistently fine-line, and this note reflects that — though the design credit going to Sébastien Laurent places the artistic conception separately from the intaglio execution, a division typical of Banque de France commissions.