5 Piastres

Pick 40 emerged from a specific administrative gap: French Indochina had no local printing capacity, so all currency production ran through the Banque de France in Paris, a logistical dependency that made wartime supply precarious and postwar restocking slow. The 1920 date reflects restocking after the First World War disrupted earlier shipments rather than a fresh issue tied to any monetary reform.

Ruffe's engraving work for the Banque de France was consistently fine-line, and this note benefits from that precision — though the humid circulation conditions of Indochina were hard on French-printed paper, and genuinely uncirculated survivors are disproportionately rare relative to the series' original print run.