100 Dollars

The Straits Settlements dollar was pegged to the Mexican silver peso through much of the nineteenth century, but by 1901 the shift toward a managed sterling-linked rate was already in motion — the currency board arrangements that would formally stabilize the system came only after years of volatile silver prices that had played havoc with trade financing across the Straits ports. A government-issued $100 note, rather than one drawn on a chartered bank, reflects how far the colonial administration had moved toward centralizing currency authority away from institutions like the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China.

De La Rue had been producing high-value colonial notes for British territories since the 1860s. The $100 face value made this a wholesale instrument — interbank settlements, large merchant transactions — not something most residents of Singapore, Penang, or Malacca would have handled directly.