10 Rupees Kandy; Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation was chartered in London in 1851 and became one of the dominant exchange banks operating across British colonial Asia, with Kandy serving as an interior Ceylon branch secondary to Colombo. These notes circulated in the hill country during the coffee plantation boom, when Kandy was a commercial hub for the central highlands trade. The bank collapsed spectacularly in 1884, and surviving branch notes from the 1866–1872 window are genuinely uncommon.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch — the firm behind many colonial security printings of the period — used steel intaglio engraving, the same technology they applied to postage stamps, giving the paper a characteristic ink relief detectable by touch.