20 Ðồng

The National Bank of Vietnam was established by decree in May 1951, and this note belongs to the inaugural series — the first issues printed under the State of Vietnam's own central banking authority rather than the colonial Indochinese piastre system administered from Paris. Thomas De La Rue handled the full series, a common arrangement for newly independent or reorganizing governments needing security printing infrastructure they didn't yet possess domestically.

The 1951 series circulated alongside French Indochinese notes during a messy transitional period, which complicates attribution of wear on surviving examples. Notes that saw genuine commercial use in Saigon often show horizontal fold stress along the lower third — a consequence of how merchants folded and stored small denominations in that market.