10 Rupees Badulla; Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation was one of the great overreaching colonial banks — chartered in London, operating across India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and the Far East, and catastrophically insolvent by 1884. This Badulla branch note from 1881 was issued just three years before the bank collapsed under the weight of bad loans tied to failing coffee plantations in Ceylon. The timing matters: the island's coffee industry was being annihilated by leaf rust fungus through exactly this period, and the OBC's Ceylon exposure was severe.

Badulla, deep in the Uva Province hill country, was coffee territory. Notes issued there would have circulated almost entirely within that agricultural economy.