100 Dollars

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China received its royal charter in 1853 and was one of the so-called "exchange banks" operating out of the treaty ports — institutions whose real business was financing the Indo-Chinese trade in opium, cotton, and silk rather than serving any domestic retail market. A Hong Kong dollar note from 1861 would have circulated in an environment where Spanish-Mexican dollars and a patchwork of colonial scrip competed for daily use.

At the $100 denomination, this was a merchant instrument, not street currency. Few were printed, fewer still survived the bank's absorption into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China following the 1892 merger.