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5 Dollars
| Issuer | Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China |
|---|---|
| Year | 1885-1886 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 5 Dollars |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Designer(s) | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Black and blue intaglio print on plain paper. The royal coat of arms with lion and unicorn supporters is centred at top, encircled by the legend "INCORPORATED BY ROYAL CHARTER"; two circular "5 DOLLARS" medallions flank the arms. A large blue guilloche underprint reading "FIVE" dominates the lower half, overlaid with the bank's promise-to-pay text in script; multilingual border inscriptions in Chinese, Jawi Arabic, and Tamil surround the entire design. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | 5 |
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| Comments |
The Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China was one of the British exchange banks operating under Royal Charter in the eastern trade corridors, and its Hong Kong branch issued notes like this one to service the substantial volume of silver-based commerce moving between the colony, the treaty ports, and London. The bank was absorbed into the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in 1892, which makes this mid-1880s window the final years of independent issue.
Perkins, Bacon produced plates of exceptional intaglio quality — their anti-counterfeiting work was among the best available in the period, a deliberate choice for a note that circulated in markets where forgery of foreign bank paper was a persistent problem.