1000 Rials Imam Reza shrine

This note was issued in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and Bank Markazi faced an acute political problem: the existing high-denomination plates had been produced by Thomas De La Rue under the Shah's government, and many featured imagery now ideologically unacceptable to the new regime. The Imam Reza shrine at Mashhad provided a solution — a distinctly Islamic subject that could pass revolutionary scrutiny while the government worked toward fully domesticated production.

De La Rue continued printing for the Islamic Republic into the early 1980s, an arrangement that attracted little public attention at the time given the anti-Western political climate in Tehran.