5 Pesos

The Administración de Hacienda y Crédito operated as Colombia's national treasury authority during a period of profound fiscal instability following independence, when the government repeatedly turned to paper emissions to cover chronic shortfalls. PS#156 belongs to a series of treasury obligations — part note, part warrant — that blurred the line between circulating currency and short-term government debt instruments. These were not bank notes in the commercial sense; they were issued on the authority of the Tesoro Nacional itself, which made their acceptance in trade highly dependent on local confidence in the state's ability to redeem them.

Colombian treasury paper from this decade is genuinely scarce. Many emissions were recalled, mutilated, or simply disintegrated in a tropical climate that is particularly unforgiving to mid-19th-century paper stocks.