5 Centavos

The Philippine National Bank's Cebu Currency Committee issued this note as an emergency measure following the Japanese invasion, when normal banking channels collapsed and the archipelago fragmented into isolated currency zones. Cebu, as the major commercial center of the Visayas, needed a locally workable medium of exchange — hence a series of low-denomination fractional notes printed under improvised conditions with whatever materials were at hand.

Locally produced under wartime duress, these notes show considerable variation in paper stock and impression quality across surviving examples — not a collector grading concern but a direct consequence of the circumstances of manufacture.