2018. from London to Calcutta, and its extension to China in 1871; placed most British banks (including Chartered Bank) to expand and develop its business. Expansion and transition to a merger: 1900 to 1969 The bank's expansion continued to the 1900s, leading it to open branches across Asia. The bank's traditional business was in cotton from Bombay, indigo and tea from Calcutta, rice from Burma, sugar from Java, tobacco from Sumatra, hemp from Manila and silk from Yokohama. In the early 1900s, the bank opened offices in New York and Hamburg. When it established its New York branch in 1912, Chartered Bank became the first foreign bank to be issued a licence to operate in New York. In 1923 the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed Chartered Bank's office in Yokohama, Japan, and killed a number of its staff. In 1927 the bank acquired P&O Bank, which had offices in Colombo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canton (present day, Guangzhou). P&O Bank also owned Allahabad Bank. The operations of P&O Bank were merged with Chartered Bank. But Allahabad Bank continued to be run as a separate entity. The bank was greatly affected by the Second World War. Their UK office had an established sports ground in East Molesey in Surrey, which included an active rugby club. The site had once been a large country estate and the house known as the ‘Wilderness’. It was demolished when the park was developed into a high-class residential estate in 1876. The new ‘Wilderness’ was a red brick house, built in 1881 in Jacobean style. In 1929 the house, together with the land on the other side of the river Mole, was laid out as a sports ground, firstly for the Distillers Company, and then for the construction group Trollope & Colls. Later the estate became the sports ground of the Standard Chartered Bank. A disastrous fire gutted the house in 1983. The ground was sold for housing development and their sports club closed. In 1957, the bank acquired Eastern Bank, giving Chartered a network of branches in Aden, Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar and the UAE. Chartered also bought the Ionian Bank's Cyprus Branches. In 1964, the government of Indonesia nationalised Chartered Bank's branch as a part of Konfrontasi''. The branch was later merged into Bank Umum Negara, a state-owned bank. Bank Umum Negara then evolved into present-day Bank Mandiri. In 1969, Chartered Bank merged with the