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10 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1883-1886 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Blue and red letterpress print with a red guilloche underprint at centre. The bank's coat of arms is set at upper centre within the text panel, flanked by the numeral "10" in oval guilloche cartouches at each upper corner. Multilingual border inscriptions in Chinese, Jawi, and Tamil surround the note, with the full promissory text in English occupying the main field. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Blue print on plain paper. The reverse is dominated by a large central guilloche rosette of concentric lathe-work ovals, flanked symmetrically by four smaller circular guilloche medallions, each bearing the numeral "10". A pale red underprint band runs horizontally across the centre. |
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The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the major British exchange banks operating across Asia in the nineteenth century, issuing notes that functioned primarily as instruments of trade finance rather than everyday currency. Its Hong Kong dollar notes circulated alongside those of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Oriental Bank — a crowded field that only the strongest institutions survived.
The Mercantile Bank did not survive intact. Severe losses in the mid-1880s forced a reconstruction in 1893, after which it was refloated as the Mercantile Bank of India. Notes from the 1883–1886 window predate that collapse and are rare partly because the bank's own difficulties disrupted normal record-keeping and redemption procedures.