Heroes on your money

Next time I hear a bible-thumping preacher declaring that “money is the root of all evil,” I will refer him to 1 Timothy 6:10 for the complete line that reads: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Better still, I will refer him to the Parokya ni Edgar cover song with this refrain: Bakit ang pera may mukha/ Bakit ang mukha walang pera/ O ang pera nga naman/ O ang pera nga naman/ O ang tao nga nama’y… Mukhang pera (Originally by the 90s band The Youth).

Why indeed does money have a face, but a face has no money? The derogatory sense of the phrase “mukhang pera” is lost in translation when it is rendered from the original Filipino into “resembles money” when actually it is used to refer to a greedy, grasping person.

Money, banknotes in particular, have portraits to complement the numbers, texts, and colors that differentiate one bill from another. Furthermore, portraits on banknotes deter forgery. Study a banknote portrait with a magnifying glass and you will see minute details that make for a genuine bill. Hair and beard are the hardest to fake, and a fine example is Benjamin Franklin’s image on the $100 bill.

When a person is internationally recognized, a banknote becomes a country’s calling card: Mao for China, Gandhi for India, Ho Chi Minh for Vietnam, Washington for the United States, Queen Elizabeth for the United Kingdom, or the recently deceased King Bhumibol for Thailand. One exception is Japan: The image of its emperor is absent from its banknotes.

So who are selected to appear on banknotes, and why? Does the value of the person to a nation match the value of the currency? Is Rizal on the P1 coin less important than Escoda, Lim, and Abad Santos on the P1,000 bill? Rizal is the most important, being the prime national hero; hence, he is on the basic unit of currency. But it was not always that way.

Contrary to popular belief, Rizal was not always on the P1. Way back in 1924, when the Philippines was still a US colony, Apolinario Mabini had pride of place as the face on the P1 bill. Rizal was on the P2 bill, US President William McKinley on the $5 bill, and George Washington on the $10 bill. Banknotes issued in 1936 during the Commonwealth carried the same faces on the notes until all was disrupted by the Japanese Occupation, when banknotes of all denominations carried only one image—that of the Rizal Monument. Inflation then was so high that the Japanese notes were nearly worthless and were referred to as “Mickey Mouse money.” Old people recall that one needed a bayong full of MMMs in exchange for a bayong of vegetables.

In 1949, the Central Bank of the Philippines issued its first banknotes; they were known as the English series because all the texts on them were in English, and they were printed in London by Thomas de la Rue. As a free and independent nation, the Philippines had banknotes celebrating these 19th-century heroes of the struggle for nationhood: P1, Mabini; P2, Rizal; P5, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Graciano Lopez-Jaena; P10, Gomburza; P20, Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto; P50, Antonio Luna; and P100, Tandang Sora. In addition, there were two 20th-century presidents: Manuel Luis Quezon, president of the Commonwealth (P200), and Manuel Roxas, last president of the Commonwealth

and first president of postwar Philippines (P500). These two have remained on our currency to this day.

Also in 1949, there were three living presidents who couldn’t appear on money: Sergio Osmeña, Jose P. Laurel, and Emilio Aguinaldo (who should have appeared earlier as president of the First Republic but he lived till 1964). After outliving all his enemies, Aguinaldo sneaked in on the reverse of the P2 bill in 1974 as part of a depiction of the Declaration of Independence on June 12, 1898, from his home in Kawit, Cavite. Aguinaldo’s image appeared only in 1985 on the P5 bill, replacing Bonifacio’s. He was then demoted to a coin in 1991 that was worth a small Coke known as “Sakto.”

Rizal appeared on the P1 banknote only in 1969, replacing Mabini who was raised to the P10. Rizal appeared on a coin in 1972 but as late as 1974, his image was also circulating via P1 and P2 bills.

All these may seem like obscure numismatic information, but from them we can read both the changing times and the historiography that go into the question of heroes.

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