20 Centavos

The Leyte Emergency Currency Board was one of dozens of local issuing bodies that sprang up across the Philippine provinces after the Japanese invasion severed ties with the Philippine National Bank and the Commonwealth government fled. These emergency boards operated under whatever printing resources remained locally available — in Leyte's case, a small commercial press in Tacloban — and the notes reflect that: rough registration, uneven ink distribution, and paper sourced from whatever stock hadn't been commandeered.

Quintin Paredes, Jr., one of the three signatories here, came from a prominent political family; his father had served as Resident Commissioner to the United States. The guerrilla currency boards often drew on local elites precisely because their names carried enough authority to make the paper acceptable in trade.