10 Shillings Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China — incorporated by Royal Charter in 1857 — operated across a string of Asian ports at a moment when sterling-denominated exchange banking was genuinely profitable and largely unregulated. A 10 Shilling denomination is an odd choice for an institution whose core business ran in hundreds and thousands of pounds across foreign exchange markets; fractional notes of this type were almost certainly intended for local payroll or petty commercial use at one of the bank's branches rather than for interbank settlement.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch were the dominant security printers in Britain through much of the nineteenth century, responsible for stamps and banknotes across the empire. Their steel-intaglio work was chosen precisely because counterfeiting was a serious operational risk in treaty-port Asia.