5 Pesos With overprint

The Philippine National Bank was established in 1916, and its early note issues ran into immediate supply problems — the bank had to issue provisional notes by overprinting existing stock rather than waiting on fresh printings. This particular overprinted 5 Pesos is a product of that scramble, with the PNB stamp applied to notes originally produced under a different authorization.

Overprinted PNB issues from this period are genuinely scarcer than their face-printed counterparts, largely because the overprint runs were short and the notes themselves were quickly absorbed into the heavy commercial circulation that characterized Manila banking in the late colonial period.