1 Fanam

The Ceylon fanam occupies an awkward administrative moment — the British had formally taken the island from the Dutch in 1796, but were still sorting out what a coherent colonial coinage should look like. These small silver pieces continued a denomination inherited from earlier VOC and indigenous South Asian monetary practice, where the fanam had circulated across trade networks stretching from Ceylon to the Malabar Coast for centuries before any European power arrived.

The series was short-lived under British administration. By the 1820s, rationalization of Ceylon's coinage pushed out fractional survivors like this one.