10 Dollars Mount Kinabalu

The British North Borneo Chartered Company was one of the last chartered trading companies granted quasi-governmental powers by the Crown, administering what is now the Malaysian state of Sabah from 1881 until the Japanese invasion of 1941. Its banknotes functioned as the territorial currency, backed not by a central bank but by the company's own commercial operations and land revenues — an arrangement that would have looked archaic even by the standards of 1896.

The P#5 series ran across an unusually long window for a colonial issue, spanning three decades during which the company's financial position shifted considerably. Notes from the earlier end of the run are substantially scarcer; surviving examples with legible date stamps from the 1890s command significant premiums precisely because the redemption infrastructure was never systematic.

Mount Kinabalu had not yet been officially surveyed when the first of these notes was issued.