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50 Rupees
| Issuer | Oriental Bank Corporation, Colombo |
|---|---|
| Year | 1881-1884 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Cotton paper |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Printed in soft rose and green tones, the reverse is dominated by a central mirror-image vignette of two classical female portrait busts facing each other, rendered within an elaborate guilloche framework of interlacing lathe-work. The denomination numeral 50 appears in each corner within ornate guilloche rosettes, with the Sinhala and Tamil script legends flanking the central vignette at left and right. A SPECIMEN perforation is visible through the centre of the note. |
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| Protection type | Specimen perforation |
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| Comments |
The Oriental Bank Corporation, chartered in Bombay in 1842 and eventually headquartered in London, was one of the principal British exchange banks operating across the Indian Ocean rim. Its Colombo branch served Ceylon's export trade — tea, coconut, rubber — and the note would have moved through planter and merchant hands rather than retail circulation. The bank collapsed in May 1884, a victim of bad colonial lending and falling commodity prices, which abruptly ended this series.
The "AA" prefix and specimen perforation mark this as a printer's specimen, almost certainly retained by Bradbury, Wilkinson rather than issued. Surviving issued examples from the 1881–1884 window are extremely rare precisely because the failure gave depositors and the liquidators little reason to preserve paper.