20 Pesos

The Cebu Currency Committee was formed in late 1941 as Japanese forces advanced through the Philippine archipelago, severing normal banking and supply lines. With no access to Manila — and certainly none to established security printers abroad — the Philippine National Bank's Cebu branch improvised emergency currency on whatever stock was available locally. The result was a series of notes printed under genuinely austere wartime conditions, with production quality varying considerably across the run.

P#S218 is a guerrilla-adjacent emergency issue in the strictest sense: authorized by a committee rather than a functioning central authority, and produced without the security features that characterized prewar PNB notes. Inks, paper quality, and impression consistency all fluctuate between surviving examples.