10 Dollars

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the exchange banks — not a colonial government institution — that underwrote trade finance across the British commercial empire. Its notes circulated primarily in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the treaty ports, competing directly with issues from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. The bank had already survived one serious crisis, the 1866 Overend Gurney collapse, which wiped out several of its competitors.

Perkins, Bacon printed the plates using their steel intaglio process, the same technology they applied to postage stamps — a deliberate choice by issuing banks trying to stay ahead of forgers in markets where official currency supervision was thin.

The bank was absorbed into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in 1893, making this series orphaned within six years of its last issue date.