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100 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1861 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Black letterpress and intaglio print on plain paper. Central vignette shows Britannia seated with a lion at her side, flanked by two oval guilloche panels each bearing the denomination "100 DOLLARS". The border carries multilingual text in Jawi, Tamil, and Chinese scripts, with the bank's full title in bold letterpress across the centre. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Reverse is unprinted, presenting a plain cream paper surface with no design, text, or ornamental elements. |
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| Comments |
The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China received its royal charter in 1853 and was one of the so-called "exchange banks" operating out of the treaty ports — institutions whose real business was financing the Indo-Chinese trade in opium, cotton, and silk rather than serving any domestic retail market. A Hong Kong dollar note from 1861 would have circulated in an environment where Spanish-Mexican dollars and a patchwork of colonial scrip competed for daily use.
At the $100 denomination, this was a merchant instrument, not street currency. Few were printed, fewer still survived the bank's absorption into the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China following the 1892 merger.