20 Francs

The Banque de l'Indo-Chine was chartered in 1875 with exclusive rights to issue currency across French Indochina, and this 1888 note belongs to the earliest years when that monopoly was still being tested against a population with deep preference for Chinese copper cash and Mexican silver pesos. The 20 Francs denomination was awkward in practice — the franc-based system mapped poorly onto local commercial habits, and for much of this period the notes circulated primarily among European merchants and colonial administrators rather than through indigenous trade networks.

Bramtot and Duval were both associated with the French academic tradition, and Wullschleger's engraving work here reflects the high-intaglio conventions of late nineteenth-century French colonial printing. Notes from this issue are genuinely rare; survival rates are low even by the standards of nineteenth-century tropical paper, humidity being the obvious culprit.