Description and research notes
Original 6-octava gold payment receipt (No. 813) issued on 1 December 1773 by the royal Casa da Administração Geral dos Diamantes in Tejuco (modern Diamantina, Minas Gerais). This document represents an authenticated financial transfer from the account of Ignacio Mendes de Souza, signed and validated at the highest administrative level of the Portuguese diamond district—one of the most tightly controlled economic zones in the entire Portuguese Empire.
Unlike manuscript-only diamond-district receipts, this example is produced on an officially printed fiscal form bearing the engraved royal arms of Portugal, demonstrating its use within the elite treasury office rather than in peripheral notarial contexts. The printed template, the inked manuscript completion, and the red-brown validation marks are characteristic of the administrative procedures governing all gold leaving the diamond region under crown monopoly.
The form records the release of “seis outavas de ouro” (six octavas of gold), a denomination tied directly to Portuguese metrological standards of the 18th century. Every transaction in the diamond zone was logged under strict royal oversight, and very few printed instruments survived the destruction protocols imposed during later 18th- and early 19th-century reforms. The vast majority of known diamond-district documents are purely handwritten; printed forms of this type are exponentially rarer.
Population and rarity: based on exhaustive market research—including archival dealer records, institutional catalogues, the Numisbids/Aureo/Santa Fe corpus, and the accessible Brazilian literature—no second example of this printed 1773 Tejuco diamond-administration receipt is known. No specimen is documented in public collections in Portugal or Brazil. As of today, this is the only confirmed surviving example.
Accordingly, the document qualifies as R9 — Unique: a singular surviving fiscal artifact of the Portuguese Crown's diamond-district administration at the height of Minas Gerais gold production. Its condition, completeness, watermark-bearing paper and clearly legible serial number 813 elevate it to true museum-grade status.