1000 Réis

Banco Nacional Ultramarino was the Portuguese colonial bank of issue, and by 1909 it was circulating notes across multiple territories simultaneously — Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Portuguese India, and others — with the same plates sometimes serving more than one colony depending on overprint or place-of-payment designation. Pick 27 falls within the Mozambique-issued series, though BNU's administrative practice of recycling plate designs across territories can create attribution ambiguity in poorly documented examples.

Bradbury Wilkinson had been BNU's preferred security printer for decades, a relationship that persisted well into the twentieth century. Their intaglio work for colonial issuers was consistently fine — though what makes or breaks a P27 in practice is usually the manuscript date and signature combination, both completed by hand at the time of issue.