20 Centavos

The Philippine National Bank was established in 1916, partly to loosen American-controlled banking's grip on agricultural credit in the archipelago. These 1917 centavo emergency notes — fractional currency, essentially — were issued because the wartime silver shortage had pushed coins out of circulation, leaving small transactions without a medium. The PNB stepped in where the mint could not.

Printing in Manila rather than through a metropolitan contractor like the American Bank Note Company made these notes relatively crude by contemporary standards. That local production origin is also why surviving examples so frequently show uneven inking and soft impressions at the margins.