Catalog
See full images - free registration
Continue with Google - no registration!
or register with email
Why register? Just to keep bots out of our catalog. Your email stays private - we will never share it or send you anything uninvited. We guarantee you that!
50 Centimes - Léopold II Pattern
| Issuer | Congo Free State (1885-1908) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1896 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Weight | Log in to see details |
| Diameter | Log in to see details |
| Thickness | Log in to see details |
| Shape | Log in to see details |
| Technique | Log in to see details |
| Orientation | Log in to see details |
| Engraver(s) | Émile Fernand-Dubois |
| In circulation to | Log in to see details |
| Reference(s) | Log in to see details |
| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse script | Latin |
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Central shield bearing the arms of the Congo Free State — a lion rampant on a horizontally striped field with a five-pointed star in canton — surmounted by a royal crown. The shield is flanked by two symmetrical branches, likely of oil palm, extending across the field in an ornamental wreath arrangement. The denomination 50 CENTS appears in a curved legend above the central device, and the date 1896 is inscribed in the exergue below the shield. |
| Reverse script | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Edge | Log in to see details |
| Mint | Log in to see details |
| Mintage | Log in to see details |
| Additional information |
The Congo Free State was never a colony in the conventional sense — it was the personal property of Léopold II, registered to him privately at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference while Belgium itself had no official stake. Pattern coinage for the territory was produced in Brussels, and gold trials like this one were almost certainly never intended for circulation among the Congolese population. They functioned as proof of administrative ambition, presented to financiers and foreign dignitaries to project the image of a functioning sovereign state rather than what it actually was: a rubber extraction operation enforced by systematic mutilation.
Delmonte records only a handful of gold strikings for this type.