5 Pa'anga

Tonga's National Reserve Bank was established in 1989, taking over note-issuing functions from the Bank of Tonga — itself a relatively young institution. The 2009 series, of which this is part, was printed by De La Rue under contract, a long-standing arrangement typical of smaller Pacific island states that lack domestic security printing capacity.

P#39 is not a scarce note and circulated widely. The security package — watermark and embedded thread — reflects the minimum specification De La Rue applied to lower-denomination contracts at the time.