33.
such dollars found on exchanging them, or paying them away in Chinese shops, they were frequently mulcted of from five to ten, or even more cents per dollar.
So it is clear that the old issue of one dollar notes was a counteraction to the chopping of silver dollars. And now, sixty years afterwards, this mysteriously sacrosanct practice of mutilating the coinage continues; but there does not seem to be so much concern for the poor people these days!
To-day the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation commences moving out of its present building, the company's head office, into the temporary quarters adapted out of the old City Hall. Demolition of the Bank building will commence almost immediately after the exodus, and in due course we shall see the magnificent premises, forming the new home for this institution, rise in splendour above the dust of its predecessor; its foundations standing in historic ground.
We publish a photograph of the present Bank building taken some years ago, showing the old fountain which has also gone from its former position.
The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's rise to its present eminence in the Far Eastern financial plane is one of the romances of the Colony and of banking, not only in the East but anywhere in the world. One has but to delve into its past history to realise how great a tree has grown from the small seed planted by a group of farsighted business men in the old days of Hongkong.
Let us examine, briefly, the position of the banking Institutions of the Colony a few years after it was founded. In about four years after this island became British, only one bank had been established. An old chronicle of the Forties states that the Oriental Bank was established in Hongkong in April, 1845, being a branch of an unchartered joint stock bank which had been started in Bombay, had expanded and opened branches in several important Eastern centres.
This bank issued notes, payable on demand in what was termed "Colonial currency".
In 1860 this concern had developed into the Oriental Bank Corporation, situated in Queen's Road, but by then it had a number of contemporaries who had established themselves during the past fifteen years, these being the Agra and United Service Bank, the Chartered Bank, the Chartered Mercantile Bank, and the Commercial Bank of India, all situated on Queen's Road, practically the only important business thoroughfare at that time. Three years later, in 1863, we find these banks still in existence, but two more (one a French concern) had come into being, the Central Bank of Western India, and the Comptoir d'Escompte de Paris. Incidentally, the Agra Bank and Commercial Bank suspended payment in 1866, and this caused a great deal of uneasiness and gloom in the city, though the crisis was tided over without any very serious effects.