25 Dollars

The Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation was only sixteen years old when this note was issued, still consolidating its position against the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China as the dominant exchange bank in the treaty ports. A 25-dollar denomination is an unusual choice — neither a round hundred nor a working-class denomination — and almost certainly reflects the silver tael equivalencies used in Shanghai trade at the time, where such conversions produced awkward but commercially necessary figures.

Bradbury, Wilkinson had been engraving security documents since the 1850s and brought a high standard of intaglio work to colonial banking clients. Surviving examples from this early HSBC series are genuinely rare; most saw hard use in merchant transactions and few were ever formally retired through normal redemption channels.