Catalog
5 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1885 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Black letterpress text with blue guilloche underprint on cream paper. The Royal coat of arms vignette is at upper centre, flanked by oval denomination cartouches reading '5 DOLLARS' at upper left and right, with multilingual border inscriptions in Chinese, Jawi Arabic, and Tamil scripts. A large blue 'FIVE / MALACCA / FIVE DOLLARS' guilloche overprint dominates the centre. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | 5 DOLLARS INCORPORATED BY ROYAL CHARTER Malacca 1st May 1885 THE CHARTERED MERCANTILE BANK OF INDIA, LONDON & CHINA Promise to pay the Bearer on Demand at its Branch in MALACCA in Local Currency, the sum of FIVE DOLLARS Value received. By order of the Court of Directors Ent'd Acc't MANAGER |
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| Comments |
The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China was one of the major British exchange banks operating across Asian trade routes in the nineteenth century, but by 1885 it was already in serious difficulty. The bank collapsed in 1892, one of several British overseas banks undone by a combination of bad advances on produce loans and the prolonged depression in Eastern trade during the 1880s. Notes from this final decade of operations are correspondingly rare — the bank was not issuing paper in volume, and little survived the receivership.
Perkins, Bacon & Co. engraved and printed for a large number of colonial banking clients in this period. Their characteristic fine-line steel intaglio work made counterfeiting difficult, which was the primary commercial argument for their services in markets where forgery was a genuine operational concern.