4 Tangas

The 4 Tangas denomination is itself a curiosity — the tanga was a fractional Portuguese colonial unit worth 60 réis, making this note equivalent to 240 réis, an awkward value that speaks directly to the chronic small-change shortages plaguing Portuguese Guinea in the mid-1910s. Emergency fractional paper of this kind was typically a stop-gap measure, issued when coin supply broke down under wartime shipping disruptions.

Bradbury Wilkinson's involvement guaranteed quality the colonial administration couldn't have sourced domestically, but London-printed colonial fractionals for Portuguese Africa from this period are genuinely scarce survivors — low face value meant heavy use, and few were preserved.