1 Tilla - Sayyid Muhammad Khan

Khiva's gold tillas of this period were struck under a khanate that had maintained uneasy independence between two expanding empires — Persia to the south and Russia to the north. By 1860, Russian military pressure on the Oxus frontier was becoming impossible to ignore; the khanate would fall under formal Russian protectorate status just thirteen years later, in 1873. Sayyid Muhammad Khan ruled from 1856 to 1864, a reign short enough that his coinage is genuinely scarce rather than artificially so.

Central Asian tillas of this era were struck by hand on locally prepared flans, with no pretense of mechanical uniformity.