20 Piastres

The Banque de l'Indochine's 1949 piastre issues were printed under increasingly fraught political circumstances — the First Indochina War was already underway, and French monetary authority over the region was being openly contested. This note was printed at the Banque de France's workshops in Paris, where much of the colony's currency had originated for decades, though the physical distance between press and cashier window had never felt wider than in the late 1940s.

Marguerite Dreyfus, who signed her engraving work as "Rita," handled the reverse plate — an unusual credit in a field almost entirely dominated by male engravers at that institution.