500 Rupees

The Government of Ceylon's high-denomination currency in the 1920s was largely a tool of colonial fiscal administration rather than everyday commerce — a 500 Rupee note was many months' wages for most Ceylonese, and these circulated almost exclusively within banking and mercantile channels. De La Rue produced the series in London under contract arrangements typical of Crown Colony currency management, with the Currency Board in Colombo controlling issue quantities tightly.

P#28 is genuinely rare in any grade. High-denomination colonial notes of this period that survived did so largely through bank archives, not public hands, and Ceylon's tropical humidity was particularly unkind to paper stock over the following decades.