Catalog
100 Rupees
| Issuer | Government of the Union of Burma |
|---|---|
| Year | 1948 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette of a peacock with tail fully spread in a circular display, rendered in fine intaglio engraving on a green guilloche ground. A small cartouche to the right contains a mythical Burmese chinthe figure, while ornate floral and dragon motifs frame the four borders. The denomination '100' appears in each corner, with the date 'Rangoon 1st January 1948' and two signature lines printed below the central design. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | ပြည်ထောင်စု မြန်မာ နိုင်ငံတော် အစိုးရ ငွေကျပ်တရာ (Translation: Union of Myanmar State Government One Hundred Kyat Money) |
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| Comments |
The Union of Burma came into existence on 4 January 1948, just days after independence from Britain, and this note belongs to the first sovereign issue — a transitional series that retained the rupee as the unit of account before Burma eventually moved to the kyat in 1952. De La Rue was the natural choice for a newly independent government without its own printing infrastructure, a pattern repeated across dozens of former British territories in this period.
Pick 37 is notably scarce in high grades. The tropical climate of Burma was brutal on circulating paper, and wartime disruption to banking infrastructure had already conditioned much of the population toward hoarding or rapid disposal of large-denomination notes rather than careful preservation.