5 Cents - George VI

The Commissioners of Currency, Malaya was a joint monetary authority established in 1938 to serve British Malaya and Borneo under a unified currency regime. By 1948, when this series resumed striking after the Japanese occupation had thoroughly disrupted the region's monetary infrastructure, the board was already operating on borrowed time — the Federation of Malaya had come into existence that same year, and a successor central bank was increasingly inevitable. These postwar copper-nickel issues replaced the earlier nickel coins, the wartime Japanese occupation currency having rendered pre-war stocks largely unusable in circulation.