1 Tanga

The tanga was a unit of account inherited from pre-Portuguese coastal trade networks and only later struck as actual coin — Portuguese Ceylon's monetary system remained a patchwork of local custom and Lisbon's administrative ambitions for most of the sixteenth century. Ceylon's cinnamon monopoly was the real prize, and coinage was largely secondary to the spice infrastructure being built around Colombo. KM#7 spans a minting window of over two decades, meaning attribution to a specific governor's tenure is rarely possible without documentary evidence from the Estado da India archives.