25.000 Rupiah

Membang Muda was a small town in the Riau residency of Sumatra, and its appearance on emergency currency during the Indonesian National Revolution reflects how decentralized — and desperate — the young republic's finances had become by 1948. With Dutch forces conducting military actions under the guise of "police actions," the Republican government fragmented its note-issuing across dozens of local authorities to prevent any single Dutch seizure from collapsing the currency system entirely.

Local printing on whatever materials were available means paper quality and impression consistency vary sharply across surviving examples of this series.