500 Escudos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position among colonial banks — it held the monopoly on note issue not for a single territory but for most of Portuguese overseas possessions simultaneously, rotating designs and overprints across Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, São Tomé, and others from a shared London-printed stock. This P-25 belongs to the Mozambique series, where Bradbury Wilkinson supplied the bulk of high-denomination paper through the 1950s.

At 500 Escudos, this was a substantial sum in Mozambican daily commerce in 1959 — not a note that changed hands at a market stall.