4 Pesos Tesoro Nacional

Paraguay's Tesoro Nacional issues of the early 1860s were produced almost entirely without outside technical assistance — an unusual circumstance for Latin American paper money of the period, when most regional governments were contracting engravers in London, Paris, or New York. This note was printed domestically in Asunción, under the isolationist regime of Carlos Antonio López, whose signature it bears. López had spent decades carefully sealing Paraguay from foreign commercial entanglement, making state-produced currency a point of political principle as much as practical necessity.

The series was short-lived. López died in September 1862, and the transition to his son Francisco Solano López set the country on a course toward the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance, which began in 1864 and ultimately destroyed much of Paraguay's population and its pre-war paper currency infrastructure entirely.