20 Centavos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino's 20 Centavos of 1914 belongs to a fractional emergency issue prompted by a chronic shortage of small silver coinage across Portuguese colonial territories — a problem that plagued the BNU for decades and forced repeated resort to low-denomination paper scrip. Bradbury Wilkinson, already well established as a security printer for colonial and Commonwealth issuers by this point, handled the production in London.

Pick 57 is notably scarce in any grade. Small-denomination notes of this period circulated hard and were discarded rather than saved.