5 Soles

This note belongs to the emergency fiscal emission authorized by Peru during the War of the Pacific — the conflict with Chile that began in April 1879 and would ultimately cost Peru both its treasury and its southernmost territory. The Junta Administradora y Vigilancia de la Emisión Fiscal was not a central bank in any conventional sense; it was an ad hoc supervisory body created specifically to manage and legitimize a paper currency issue that the government desperately needed to fund military operations.

Chilean forces occupied Lima in January 1881, and much of the fiscal emission was repudiated or simply abandoned in the chaos that followed. Surviving examples of the 1879 series are scarce largely because so little infrastructure existed to recall or preserve them.