5 Mil Reis

The Thesouro Nacional's reliance on the American Bank Note Company for this series reflects Brazil's chronic shortage of domestic printing infrastructure in the 1880s — a period when the empire was financing abolition payments to slaveholders and managing severe fiscal strain simultaneously. ABNC held the Brazilian treasury contract for decades, and the consistency of their intaglio work across successive issues created a de facto visual standard for imperial paper currency.

The "A" prefix in the Pick reference signals an addendum listing, meaning this note was catalogued after the main Brazil sequence was already established — a common fate for earlier imperial issues that took time to surface in sufficient numbers for systematic documentation.