5 Dollars

Barclay & Fry were a London security printer active in the late nineteenth century, less prominent in the colonial banking note trade than contemporaries like Waterlow or Bradbury Wilkinson, which makes their work for HSBC's 1890s issues relatively uncommon as a pairing. The Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation at this date was privately chartered and operating across a network of Asian treaty ports, issuing its own notes under no central bank authority — a position it would retain well into the twentieth century.

P#139 predates HSBC's later shift to De La Rue for note production. Cotton paper from this period is prone to splitting along fold lines, and examples with intact corners are harder to source than the catalogue frequency might suggest.