5 Piastres Violet

Wartime necessity drove this note's entire production story. With maritime routes severed and communication with metropolitan France effectively broken after 1940, the Banque de l'Indochine was forced to rely entirely on local resources — hence the Imprimerie d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi, a facility originally established for printing government documents, not banknotes. The design credit to Phạm Ngọc Khuê is one of the rare documented instances of a Vietnamese artist receiving attribution on an Indochinese colonial issue.

The Japanese takeover of French administrative functions in March 1945 rendered the entire circulating note stock politically complicated overnight.