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5 Rupiah
| Issuer | Bank Indonesia |
|---|---|
| Year | 1952 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Intaglio-printed in blue on a multicolour guilloche underprint, the obverse carries a three-quarter portrait vignette of a young Javanese woman in traditional dress and hair ornament at the left, set against fine lathe-work, with two cranes in flight rendered above the central panel. The bank name and denomination in large letterpress type are flanked by a radiating sunburst guilloche medallion, with the date 1952 below. Two facsimile signatures at the base are captioned DIREKTUR and GUBERNUR respectively, with designer and printer credits in the lower margin. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | The reverse is covered by a dense, symmetrical guilloche vignette of traditional Javanese-style floral and foliate scrollwork in fine intaglio, with two confronted serpentine dragon figures emerging from stylised lotus blossoms at the lower centre. The denomination numeral 5 appears in each lower corner within the ornamental border, and a two-column anti-counterfeiting warning text in Bahasa Indonesia is set in small letterpress type at the lower centre. Serial numbers are printed in black letterpress at the upper left and upper right of the design. |
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| Comments |
Thomas De La Rue printed the entire 1952 Indonesian series under a contract arrangement that reflected the young republic's lack of domestic printing infrastructure — Bank Indonesia had only been established in 1953, and notes like this were already in circulation before the central bank formally existed, issued under transitional authority.
Mechelse's involvement as designer is the genuinely unusual detail here. A Dutch national working for a former colonial subject state so shortly after independence was not without political friction, and his name appearing in the margins of Indonesian currency in 1952 says something about the practical compromises of decolonization that no official record quite captures.