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10 Rupees Jaffna; Oriental Bank Corporation
| Issuer | Oriental Bank Corporation |
|---|---|
| Year | 1864 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Black intaglio print on white paper. The British Royal Arms vignette occupies top centre, flanked by oval guilloche panels bearing the denomination '10 RUPEES' at left and right. The promise-to-pay text is set in letterpress below, with 'THE ORIENTAL BANK CORPORATION' in bold, and the place and date 'JAFFNA, CEYLON 15th Feby. 1864' above. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Black intaglio print. The reverse is composed of three interlocking guilloche rosette panels arranged horizontally across the face of the note, printed by Perkins, Bacon & Co. using their patent hardened steel plate process. |
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| Comments |
The Oriental Bank Corporation, chartered in London in 1851, operated across British colonial Asia and at its peak maintained branches from Bombay to Yokohama. The Jaffna branch — in what is now northern Sri Lanka — was a secondary outpost serving a commercially active peninsula whose economy ran largely on tobacco cultivation and trade with the South Indian coast. Notes payable specifically at Jaffna rather than Colombo are considerably scarcer than the principal-branch issues, reflecting lower circulation volumes at the branch level.
Perkins, Bacon engraved and printed the series using their standard intaglio security method, the same firm then producing postage stamps for much of the British Empire. The bank collapsed entirely in 1884, making any surviving branch-payable note from the 1860s a document of a defunct institution with no redemption history behind it.