100 Dollars

The Chartered Bank — formally the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China — operated in Hong Kong under British colonial authority, retaining note-issuing rights that most private banks had long since surrendered elsewhere. By 1959, that privilege was increasingly anomalous. The $100 denomination sat at the top of the bank's circulating series and saw active use in trade finance across the colony's entrepôt economy, where large-denomination private bank notes remained genuinely practical instruments rather than ceremonial ones.

Waterlow & Sons had been printing colonial and commercial bank paper for decades by this point, though their reputation had taken a lasting blow from the 1925 Portuguese escudo affair. This note predates Waterlow's absorption into De La Rue by just a few years.