100 Dollars

HSBC's late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong dollar notes occupied a peculiar legal space: the bank issued them under colonial ordinance rather than any central banking authority, making HSBC — along with the Chartered Bank and a handful of others — effectively responsible for Hong Kong's private note issue. The arrangement persisted, in modified form, well into the twentieth century. De La Rue had secured the contract by the 1880s, displacing earlier printers, and the Hong Kong series represented some of their most technically demanding colonial work of that decade.

P#132 is genuinely rare at this denomination. Notes from this period that survived the humidity and commercial intensity of Treaty Port banking are few; most circulated hard through merchant houses and godowns before redemption.