Catalog
25 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1887 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Black letterpress and intaglio print on plain paper. The Royal Charter coat of arms with two lion supporters is centred at top, flanked by oval guilloche panels bearing the denomination numeral "25" at left and right. The border incorporates multilingual text in Chinese, Jawi Arabic, and Tamil scripts. Three cancellation punch holes appear at lower centre. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Reverse entirely unprinted, left blank. Three cancellation punch holes are visible at lower centre, corresponding to those on the obverse. |
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| Comments |
The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the so-called "exchange banks" operating under Royal Charter — institutions designed primarily to finance trade flows rather than serve local depositors. By 1887, the bank was heavily concentrated in Hong Kong and the treaty ports, and a 25-dollar note would have moved through commercial transactions denominated in the Hongkong dollar, which itself tracked the Mexican peso silver standard.
Perkins, Bacon & Petch were among the most technically accomplished security printers of the century, their reputation built on steel-plate engraving originally developed to combat American counterfeiting. Notes produced under their process are among the hardest to fake from the period.
The bank was absorbed into the Standard Chartered group in 1958 — surviving notes from this era are genuinely rare in any condition.