960 Réis - Pedro I

The 960 réis was not designed from scratch — it was struck over Spanish colonial 8 reales, the so-called "cobs" and milled dollars that circulated freely throughout the Atlantic world. Brazil's newly independent treasury in 1822 lacked the bullion reserves and minting infrastructure to produce coinage from raw silver, so the solution was to counterstamp and overstrike existing foreign coin. The host coin is almost always visible beneath Pedro I's issue, and identifying the underlying mint — Lima, Potosí, Mexico City — is half the collector's work with this type.

KM#368 covers the first years of Brazilian imperial coinage, struck at Rio de Janeiro under a government that was barely a year old when production began.