50 Centavos

Municipal treasury notes from the Philippine occupation period are among the most historically loaded pieces of Philippine paper money. When the Japanese Military Administration effectively displaced American colonial currency, local governments — barangays, municipalities, towns — were left to issue their own emergency scrip to keep commerce moving. Bantayan is a small island municipality in Cebu province, geographically isolated enough that supply disruptions hit hard and local scrip became genuinely necessary rather than merely supplemental.

These municipal issues varied wildly in print quality and paper stock, often produced on whatever was available. Survival rates are low not because of heavy circulation but because the notes were considered worthless after liberation and discarded.