5 Dollars

The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China obtained its royal charter in 1853 and was one of the exchange banks — not a colonial issuer in the conventional sense — operating under British banking law and authorized to issue notes across multiple territories simultaneously. By 1874, its Hong Kong branch was its most active note-issuing center, though notes of this period were also payable at its offices in Shanghai, Singapore, and Bombay.

Batho, Sprague & Co. handled security printing for a number of the British overseas chartered banks in this period before the major consolidations that would see much of that work absorbed by Bradbury Wilkinson and De La Rue. Surviving examples from this 1874 issue are extremely rare — most were redeemed and pulped as a matter of routine banking housekeeping, and fire and flood losses at branch offices claimed others.