500 000 Kwanzas

Angola's 1991 hyperinflationary spiral forced the Banco Nacional de Angola to issue denominations that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The 500,000 Kwanza note is a direct product of that collapse — by the time it circulated, the civil war between the MPLA government and UNITA had been grinding for over fifteen years, hollowing out the formal economy and destroying any confidence in the currency's purchasing power.

Thomas De La Rue's involvement is notable mainly because the printing contract continued despite Angola's dire fiscal state. The single watermark security feature reflects a stripped-back specification — barely adequate for a denomination this large.