10 Gulden Kopergeld

De Javasche Bank was established by royal decree in 1828 as the central bank of the Dutch East Indies, and its earliest note issues are among the rarest surviving colonial paper from the archipelago. The 1832 series, of which this 10 Gulden Kopergeld belongs, circulated in a colony where copper coinage — "kopergeld" — was the everyday transactional currency for much of the indigenous and lower-merchant population. Denominating a banknote specifically in copper guilders rather than silver was a deliberate acknowledgment of that reality.

Surviving examples from this period are exceptionally scarce; the tropical climate of Java was brutal on paper, and institutional redemption programs destroyed much of what circulation did not.