5 Rupiah

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.