50 Đồng

P#17 belongs to the South Vietnamese series printed by Bradbury Wilkinson at their New Malden works during a period when the wartime economy was generating severe inflationary pressure. The National Bank relied heavily on British and American security printers throughout the 1960s, partly because domestic printing capacity was essentially nonexistent and partly because foreign-printed notes were harder to counterfeit — a genuine operational concern given active North Vietnamese efforts to flood the south with forgeries.

Bradbury Wilkinson's intaglio work on this series is notably fine by regional standards of the period. The firm had a long relationship with Southeast Asian central banks and brought the same plate-engraving discipline they applied to Commonwealth issues.