5 Mil Reis

Rio Grande do Sul maintained its own state treasury notes well into the Republican period, a holdover from the decentralized fiscal arrangements that Getúlio Vargas — himself a gaúcho — had exploited politically before his 1930 rise to federal power. By 1934, issuing paper at the state level was already an anachronism, and this note belongs to what proved to be the final phase of such regional emissions before tighter federal monetary controls rendered them obsolete.

Litografia Henrique Meyerfreund was a Porto Alegre commercial printing firm, not a specialist security printer. The technical limitations of lithographic production for currency are visible in surviving examples, which often show soft impression and ink bleed not seen in intaglio-printed contemporaries.