10 000 Gulden

By 1997, Suriname's currency had been in freefall for years — hyperinflation through the early 1990s had rendered lower denominations functionally useless, forcing the Centrale Bank to issue notes at denominations that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. This 10,000 Gulden was a direct consequence of that collapse, not a routine high-denomination addition to an otherwise stable series.

The Surinamese Gulden was ultimately replaced by the Surinamese Dollar in January 2004, at a conversion rate of 1,000 Gulden to 1 Dollar — a ratio that says everything about what the intervening years had done to the currency's purchasing power.