The Hong Kong five hundred dollar note was first issued in undated from the 1860s by the

Oriental Bank Corporation The Oriental Bank Corporation (), or "OBC", was a British imperial bank founded in India in 1842 which grew to be prominent throughout the Far East. As an Exchange bank, the OBC was primarily concerned with the finance of trade and exchanges of ...

, the Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) but a confirmed date for this bank is 1879, followed by

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (), commonly known as HSBC (), was the parent entity of the multinational HSBC banking group until 1991, and is now its Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific subsidiary. The largest bank in Hong K ...

in 1877, the Mercantile Bank in 1948 and the

Bank of China The Bank of China (BOC; ) is a Chinese majority state-owned commercial bank headquartered in Beijing and the fourth largest bank in the world. The Bank of China was founded in 1912 by the Republican government as China's central bank, repl ...

in 1994. The Specimens are known from the

Agra and Masterman's Bank The Agra Bank was founded in 1833 in Agra in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh with a capital of £1,000,000. It was liquidated in 1900.Stuart Muirhead, Edwin Green. ''Crisis Banking in the East'', Ashgate Publishing, 1996 Agra Bank By 1840 its ...

and the Asiatic Banking Corporation between 1862-66. The National Bank of China issued theirs in the 1890s. There was a continuous issue till the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

in different colours and dimensions, they were reissued from 1946. The Mercantile bank ceased issue of this denomination after 1959. There was a standardisation of size in 1979 when the Chartered Bank reduced the size to that similar to HSBC. The colour was made uniform in 2003 when brown for all banknotes was adopted.

References

*Ma Tak Wo 2004, Illustrated Catalogue of Hong Kong Currency, Ma Tak Wo Numismatic Co., LTD Kowloon Hong Kong. {{Authority control Banknotes of Hong Kong Five-hundred-base-unit banknotes