Cochinchina piastre
[1] The Comptoir national d'escompte de Paris (CNEP), which was already operating in some other French colonies, opened a branch in the city of Saigon in 1862.
Vietnamese merchants quickly took this opportunity to purchase chopped Mexican pesos from China and independent Đại Nam and sold them to the French authorities for a profit.
The French governor of Cochinchina was forced to rescind this decree and all coins went back to being traded at their actual weights.
[1] On March 5, 1863, the silver French Francs and copper Centime coins were made legal tender for commercial transactions.
[2] During the colonial era in French Cochinchina Chinese sapèques (known as lý) were exclusively used as casino tokens by gambling houses and weren't used for other purchases unless trade was being conducted with Qing China.
[1] Charles Lemire described the heavy nature and difficult mobility of strings of sapèques as "a currency worthy of Lycurgus of Sparta" and non numerantur, sed ponderantur ("They are not counted but weighed").
[1] Around the time that Charles Lemire entered Saigon around 1868 the presence of sapèques in circulation in Cochinchina has become less common but it was stated that the locals still preferred them over the European-style copper and silver currency introduced by the French.
[1] The products described by Lemire which were of a value smaller than a cent in the year 1868 include an areca nut, betel leaves, tobacco, cigarettes, a single cup of tea, a single slice of pineapple, an orange fruit, a jackfruit, a fragment of sugar cane, a spoonful of fish sauce, or a palm leaf hat.
[3] Merchants used this as a loophole to trade in their chopmarked Mexican pesos for non-chopmarked ones at the French Treasury and made a huge profit off of it.
After the unpunched 1 centime and other French franc coins were introduced they would see little circulation with the local population, while the merchants still preferred the Mexican peso for their trade.
[2][6] The governor of French Cochinchina established a study group to design coins which would be accepted by the local population on December 24, 1878 by decree.
[8] Larger copper centimes and the silver coins of French Cochinchina all showed a seated personification of the Republic from the Great Seal of France.
[9] The banknotes of 5, 20 and 100 Dollars/Piastres, issued by the Banque de l'Indochine and similar in design to later French Indochina notes, are currently extremely rare.
The governor's decree of January 25, 1875 authorized the establishment of a privately capitalised bank which would hold a monopoly of issuing banknotes for the colony.
