500 Piastres

Banque de l'Indochine's high-denomination issues of this period were produced in Paris under Banque de France facilities, which gave them a quality of engraving rarely matched by colonial printers elsewhere. Marguerite Dreyfus — known professionally as Rita — was among the more accomplished intaglio engravers working at the Banque de France workshops during the interwar years, and her collaboration with Jules Piel on the obverse plate is unusual; shared engraving credits on a single face typically signal a divided commission, one engraver handling figures, the other architectural or decorative elements.

The 1939 print date places this squarely in the months before French Indochina's supply lines to metropolitan France were severed by the fall of 1940. Subsequent 500 Piastres issues had to be produced under dramatically different conditions — some eventually printed in Hanoi rather than Paris.