Catalog
100 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1873 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Black letterpress and intaglio print on white paper. Royal coat of arms vignette at upper centre, flanked by two oval guilloche cartouches bearing the denomination numeral "100"; multilingual border inscriptions in Chinese, Jawi, Tamil, and Arabic surround the design. Manuscript "SPECIMEN" overprint appears at lower right. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | 100 INCORPORATED BY ROYAL CHARTER SINGAPORE THE CHARTERED MERCANTILE BANK OF INDIA, LONDON & CHINA Promises to pay the Bearer on Demand at its Branch in SINGAPORE in Local Currency, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS Value received. By order of the Court of Directors ENT D ACCOUNT T SPECIMEN 大銀壹百員 18 |
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The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was incorporated by royal charter in 1853 and operated as one of the handful of British exchange banks financing trade across the Eastern corridors — Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Calcutta. By 1873 it was printing high-denomination currency for colonial commercial circulation, not retail use. These notes moved between merchants and counting houses, rarely touching ordinary hands.
Perkins, Bacon & Petch had by this point decades of experience printing secure documents for colonial issuers, their steel-engraving technique making counterfeiting genuinely difficult. The bank collapsed in 1892 following a prolonged squeeze on Eastern exchange business, which effectively ended the series.