100 Som 200th Anniversary of Kurmanjan Datka

Kurmanjan Datka ruled the Alai region of what is now southern Kyrgyzstan through the turbulent decades of Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia. When Tsarist forces finally subdued the Alai in 1876, she negotiated submission rather than resistance — a decision that preserved her people but forced her to watch her own son Kamchybek executed to satisfy Russian demands for order. She died in 1907, in her nineties, having outlasted the empire's appetite for making martyrs of her.