5 Rupees Galle; Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation was chartered in London in 1851 and became one of the dominant exchange banks operating across British colonial Asia. By the 1860s it held a near-monopoly on silver exchange in Ceylon, and its branch notes issued at Galle — then the island's principal port before Colombo eclipsed it — circulated among merchants handling the cinnamon and coffee trades.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch were the foremost security printers of the period, responsible for the first adhesive postage stamps and a significant share of colonial currency work. The bank collapsed in 1884, caught in the wreckage of the Australian land credit crisis, making surviving pre-failure branch notes genuinely uncommon.