Catalog
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| Issuer | De Javasche Bank |
|---|---|
| Year | 1897-1919 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 1000 Gulden |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | Log in to see details |
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| Engraver(s) | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Brown-toned note with a vignette of Mercury at the left margin and an intaglio portrait of Jan Pieterzoon Coen, shown with ruffled collar, at the right. At top center, three crowned civic arms — representing Surabaya, Batavia, and Semarang — are arranged within ornamental wreaths, flanked by elaborate guilloche borders. The issuing bank's title and denomination inscription are rendered in letterpress across the face. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Printed in yellow, brown, and green, the reverse carries anti-counterfeiting legal text in four languages — Dutch, Javanese, Chinese, and Malay — arranged in distinct panels across the note. The multilingual layout reflects the diverse linguistic communities of the Netherlands Indies, with the Javanese text rendered in traditional Hanacaraka script. Guilloche underprint patterns in the background provide additional visual security. |
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| Comments |
De Javasche Bank operated as the central bank of the Dutch East Indies, and its high-denomination notes were overwhelmingly instruments of interbank settlement and colonial trade finance — not retail circulation. A 1000 Gulden note in this series would have moved between European merchant houses in Batavia and Amsterdam correspondents, rarely passing through ordinary hands. That near-total absence from everyday commerce is precisely why surviving examples are sparse.
Enschedé's involvement goes back well before this issue; the Haarlem firm had printed for the bank since its earliest decades, and the relationship gave these notes a consistency of intaglio quality that colonial-era issues from other Asian territories rarely matched.