10 Rupees Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation was chartered in London in 1851 and operated across British India, Ceylon, China, and the Straits Settlements — one of the few exchange banks with enough reach to make a private banknote issuance genuinely functional across multiple colonial territories. Perkins, Bacon & Co. produced the plates, the same London security printers responsible for many early colonial stamps and notes of the period, using their intaglio process to produce work difficult to counterfeit locally.

The bank collapsed spectacularly in 1884, wiped out largely by bad loans tied to Ceylon's coffee crop failures following the *Hemileia vastatrix* blight. Notes from this issue window predate that crisis by over a decade.