100 Rupees Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation collapsed in May 1884, making any note issued in 1881 part of the final operational years of what had been one of the most expansive colonial banks of the nineteenth century. At its peak the bank held note-issuing rights across Ceylon, Hong Kong, Mauritius, and parts of India — a genuinely unusual breadth for a private institution. The failure, triggered by a combination of bad Ceylon coffee plantation loans and a silver depreciation crisis, was the largest bank collapse British India had yet seen.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced the plates in London, though circulation occurred across multiple territories simultaneously, complicating provenance attribution on surviving examples.