5 Ðồng

This note belongs to the first unified currency issue following reunification in 1976, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam replaced both the South Vietnamese đồng and the Viet Cong's Giải Phóng đồng at a conversion rate that wiped out significant private savings — a deliberate policy measure, not an administrative convenience. The northern currency had already undergone its own redenomination in 1959, so Hanoi had experience using monetary reform as an instrument of economic restructuring.

Pick 81 is among the lower denominations of that inaugural series, and circulated heavily through a period of chronic shortages. Worn examples vastly outnumber clean ones.