1000 Gulden

De Javasche Bank operated as the central bank of the Dutch East Indies, and its high-denomination notes were overwhelmingly instruments of interbank settlement and colonial trade finance — not retail circulation. A 1000 Gulden note in this series would have moved between European merchant houses in Batavia and Amsterdam correspondents, rarely passing through ordinary hands. That near-total absence from everyday commerce is precisely why surviving examples are sparse.

Enschedé's involvement goes back well before this issue; the Haarlem firm had printed for the bank since its earliest decades, and the relationship gave these notes a consistency of intaglio quality that colonial-era issues from other Asian territories rarely matched.