50 Rupees Oriental Bank Corporation

The Oriental Bank Corporation collapsed in May 1884, making any note issued in the years immediately prior — this 1881 specimen among them — part of a very short final chapter. The bank had operated across India, Ceylon, China, and Australia since the 1840s, but a run of bad agricultural loans in Ceylon and exposure to failing indigo plantations gutted its reserves. The British government declined to intervene.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced the plate in London, a common arrangement for colonial banking paper where security printing infrastructure in the issuing territory was inadequate. Notes returned to London for printing and shipped back out — sometimes months passed between production and deployment.