500 Rupees

Thomas De La Rue has printed Sri Lankan currency for decades, a relationship that predates the Central Bank itself — the printer supplied notes to Ceylon before independence and has remained the dominant supplier through successive series. This note falls within a long-running P#126 design type that spans over a decade of reissue with minimal substantive change, distinguished in the catalog primarily by signature varieties corresponding to successive governors and secretaries to the treasury.

The security specification for this series is notably modest relative to contemporaneous De La Rue output for other central bank clients — watermark and thread only, without the foil patches or color-shifting ink that the printer was supplying elsewhere by 2010.