20 Escudos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese colonial finance — it held note-issuing rights not for metropolitan Portugal but for the overseas territories, functioning as a quasi-central bank across multiple African and Asian possessions simultaneously. This 1921 issue was produced for Portuguese Guinea, a territory then generating modest groundnut export revenues but chronically short of reliable circulating currency.

Bradbury Wilkinson's engraved intaglio work on colonial series of this period is generally among the more technically accomplished commercial printing of the era — their contract portfolio ranged widely across British and Lusophone colonial issuers.

P#36 is scarce in any grade; the Guinea issues of this denomination saw genuine hard use in a humid equatorial climate that was particularly destructive to paper.