10 Rupees

The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the major British exchange banks operating across Asia in the nineteenth century, but its Kandy branch issuing its own denominated notes is a detail worth pausing on. Kandy — Ceylon's inland hill capital — was primarily a tea and coffee trade hub, and branch-issued notes from interior Ceylon are considerably rarer than those from Colombo. The bank itself was eventually absorbed into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in 1892 following a merger.

P#129A is among the earliest documented paper issues from this branch, which makes surviving examples genuinely uncommon regardless of condition.