1000 Kip Rennes le Chateau

Rennes-le-Château is a village in the French Pyrenees whose supposed buried treasure — popularized by the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later Dan Brown's fiction — spawned an entire cottage industry of commemorative issues in the 2000s. Laos was among several small nations that licensed mystery-themed gold miniatures for the collector market during this period, with no meaningful connection to the subject matter beyond the contract with a bullion dealer or distributor.

KM#161 belongs to a broader run of Lao novelty issues aimed squarely at the European thematic collector market.