20 Escudos

The Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese colonial finance — a private commercial bank granted monopoly rights over note issue across Portugal's overseas territories, from Mozambique to Timor. This 1935 issue belongs to a series produced during a period when the BNU was aggressively consolidating its emissions across multiple colonies under near-identical formats, distinguished primarily by overprint or plate text identifying the specific territory. Without the territorial designation, provenance between colonies can be genuinely ambiguous.

Bradbury Wilkinson's intaglio work on BNU colonial issues from this decade is consistently fine, though the paper has a known tendency toward foxing in high-humidity circulation environments — a practical consequence of notes spending their working lives in tropical coastal ports rather than temperate bank vaults.