5 Pesos

The Iloilo Currency Committee was one of several provincial emergency currency bodies that sprang up across the Philippine islands in the wake of the Japanese invasion, when the retreating Commonwealth government and disrupted banking infrastructure left local economies starved of circulating money. The Philippine National Bank lent its name and authority to these provincial issues, but production was entirely local — improvised printing on whatever paper and equipment was available in Iloilo City at the time.

Notes from this series are frequently encountered with uneven inking and registration problems, not as damage but as manufactured conditions. The wartime guerrilla currency connection also means many survivors were hidden for months or years, affecting paper quality in characteristic ways — foxing and fold-set are common, brittleness less so.