10 Shillings Kandy; Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was granted its charter in 1853 and became one of the principal exchange banks operating across British Asia, competing directly with the Oriental Bank and later the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation for trade finance business. Its Kandy branch served the Ceylon tea and coffee planting economy at a moment when that industry was still largely coffee — the devastating *Hemileia vastatrix* fungus that would destroy Ceylon's coffee plantations didn't fully take hold until the early 1870s.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch were the dominant security printers for colonial currency in this period, their intaglio work making crude hand-alteration of denominations or payee fields considerably more difficult. The bank was absorbed into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in 1892.