50 Rupees

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.