25 Cents

Ceylon's wartime small-denomination notes were a direct response to the acute coin shortage caused by the diversion of metals to the war effort — the same crisis that produced similar fractional paper currency across British-administered territories from Malaya to India. The Government of Ceylon, rather than the Ceylon Currency Board, issued these specifically because the amounts involved were sub-monetary in the banking sense: emergency scrip filling a gap, not formal fiduciary currency.

The series ran well past the war's end, remaining in issue into 1949 as coin production normalized only slowly. Wartime humidity in storage caused significant paper degradation in many holdings, and clean survivors from the early 1942 dates are proportionally harder to find than the later printings.