10 Dollars

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the British exchange banks operating under Royal Charter across Asian treaty ports in the nineteenth century. Its Hong Kong branch issued dollar-denominated notes like this one to service trade finance rather than retail banking — the clientele was predominantly merchant houses settling accounts in silver dollars across the China coast.

Perkins, Bacon & Co. had by this period a long track record printing colonial and imperial currency, their steel-engraved work being difficult to replicate locally. Notes from this series are genuinely scarce; the bank merged into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in 1893, and surviving examples from the 1882–1886 window are rarely encountered outside specialist auctions.