50 Rupees Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the three major British exchange banks operating across Asia in the nineteenth century, and its banknotes functioned primarily as instruments of trade finance rather than everyday currency — moving between merchant houses, agency firms, and port offices rather than through retail hands. The 1870 date places this note squarely in the bank's most active period of expansion through the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, and the China coast.

Perkins, Bacon printed the plate using their steel-engraving security method, the same technology they had applied to early postage stamps. Notes from this series are rarely encountered because survival rates for high-denomination colonial trade paper of this period are extremely low — most were redeemed and pulped within the issuing branch's own accounting cycle.