See full images - free registration
Continue with Google - no registration! or register with email

Why register? Just to keep bots out of our catalog. Your email stays private - we will never share it or send you anything uninvited. We guarantee you that!

100 Piastres

Issuer Banque de l'Indo-Chine
Year 1911-1919
Type Standard circulation banknote
Value Log in to see details
Currency Log in to see details
Composition Log in to see details
Size Log in to see details
Shape Log in to see details
Printer Log in to see details
Designer(s) Log in to see details
Engraver(s) Log in to see details
In circulation to Log in to see details
Reference(s) Log in to see details
Obverse description Log in to see details
Obverse lettering Log in to see details
Reverse description The reverse is printed in a dark violet-grey intaglio on plain paper, dominated by a large horizontal dragon vignette at the upper centre set against a scale-pattern guilloche background. Three horizontal bands of Chinese characters in formal kaishu script occupy the upper registers, while the lower section contains two vertical cartouches with additional Chinese text flanking a central decorative lozenge motif. A small French-language legal text panel appears at the lower centre, and designer and engraver credits are printed in the bottom margins.
Reverse lettering 壹百元 奉本國特諭 東方滙理銀行 銀壹百元見字交銀 高綿 六省 h. Bellery-Desfontaines del. E. Gaspé SC.
Signature(s) Log in to see details
Protection type Log in to see details
Protection description Log in to see details
Variants Log in to see details
Comments

Banque de France printed this series for Banque de l'Indo-Chine under a formal production arrangement — the same relationship that supplied notes for several French colonial territories in the early twentieth century. Bellery-Desfontaines was primarily a poster and decorative arts designer, a slightly unconventional choice for banknote work, and his involvement here places this series at an interesting intersection of Art Nouveau commercial illustration and intaglio currency production.

Ruffe and Gaspérini were both accomplished Banque de France engravers working the plates on opposite sides — an unusual split credit for a colonial issue of this denomination.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE