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The Democratic Republic of Vietnam issued its first independent currency in late 1946, just weeks after the outbreak of the Franco-Vietnamese War. These earliest notes were produced under extraordinarily difficult conditions — the nascent government lacked access to sophisticated printing infrastructure, and production shifted between locations as French military pressure intensified. The result is a series with considerable variation in paper quality, ink consistency, and watermark clarity across surviving examples.

Pick 4 is among the first emissions of a government that had existed for barely a year when it began issuing its own currency to replace colonial piastres — a deliberate act of economic separation from French Indochina's monetary system.