10 Pesos

Banco Comercial de Chile was a short-lived private issuing institution operating during the era when Chilean commercial banks still held the right to circulate their own notes — a privilege revoked by the Ley de Bancos of 1925, which transferred issuance exclusively to the Banco Central. By 1898 that transition was still decades away, but the Comercial was already financially precarious, and its notes circulated against a backdrop of chronic peso depreciation driven largely by the abandonment of gold convertibility in 1878.

Waterlow & Sons printed for dozens of Latin American issuers during this period, and the security watermark embedded in the cotton stock was their standard hedge against the regional counterfeiting networks that had plagued Chilean currency since the 1870s.