5 Rupees

The Oriental Bank Corporation, chartered in Bombay in 1842, was one of the great colonial banking failures of the Victorian period — it collapsed in 1884 under the weight of bad Ceylon coffee plantation loans, wiping out shareholders and triggering a protracted liquidation that ran into the 1890s. Notes from the 1864–1875 window predate the warning signs and were issued when the bank still operated branches across India, Ceylon, Mauritius, China, and Australia, making currency management a genuinely complex logistical problem across multiple monetary systems.

Perkins, Bacon engraved and printed the plates in London — the same firm responsible for the Penny Black. Their intaglio work on colonial bank notes from this period is technically accomplished and notoriously difficult to counterfeit, which was the whole point.