French Indochinese piastre
currency of French Indochina between 1885 and 1952
The piastre de commerce ("trade piastre") was the currency of French Indochina between 1887 and 1954. It was first used in 1885. It was subdivided into 100 cents, each of 2~6 sapèques.
The name piastre (French pronunciation: [pjastʁ]), from Spanish pieces of eight (pesos), dates to the 16th century and has been used as the name of many different historical units of currency.
Denominations
The currency of French Indochina was divided into the piastre, cent / centime, and sapèque units. One piastre equals 100 cents and one cent equals between 2 and 6 sapèques depending on the dynasty and reign era. According to that ratio, a French Indochinese piastre coin is worth from 200 to 600 traditional Vietnamese cash coins. The obverse of the banknotes and coins were inscribed in the French language, while the reverse side had inscriptions written in Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese Latin script, Lao, and Khmer scripts, but sometimes only French inscriptions were written.
History
Prior to the arrival of the French in the Indochinese peninsula in the second half of the 19th century, cash coins similar to those used in the provinces of China circulated in the area that is nowadays known as Vietnam. There was also a silver milled dragon coin and associated subsidiary coinage in circulation.
“French Indochinese piastre” enters the record as currency of French Indochina between 1885 and 1952. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what French, Indochinese and piastre can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “French Indochinese piastre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.