100 Dollars

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.