5 Khumsi - Qu'aiti Sultanate

The Qu'aiti Sultanate of Shihr and Mukalla occupied a commercially strategic stretch of the Hadhramaut coast, and by 1901 its rulers had long operated under British protection while maintaining their own administrative apparatus — including a local coinage. The khumsi denomination, a fifth of an anna, placed this piece at the base of a hybrid monetary system that sat awkwardly between indigenous reckoning and the Indian rupee standard imposed by British commercial dominance in the Gulf of Aden ports.

KM#48 is among the earlier struck issues of the Qu'aiti series, predating the more regularized coinages of the 1930s and 1940s.