1000 Tögrög Year of the Ox

Mongolia's late-1990s lunar gold series was produced in small quantities for the collector market, with pieces like this struck at European contract mints rather than domestically — Mongolia had no facility capable of producing fine gold coinage to international specification at the time. The Year of the Ox falls in the twelve-year Tibetan-Mongolian lunar cycle, a calendrical tradition with deeper cultural roots in Mongolia than the Chinese version more familiar to Western collectors.