20 000 Kip

The Banque Nationale du Laos — more precisely the Bank of the Lao PDR — issued this denomination during a period of sustained inflation that had made smaller notes effectively impractical for everyday transactions. The 20,000 kip entered circulation as one of the higher-value notes in the series, a reflection of how far the kip had depreciated since the economic turbulence of the late 1990s, when the Asian financial crisis hit the Lao economy particularly hard and the currency lost a significant fraction of its value against the dollar in a very short period.

Cotton substrate and a security thread place it within the standard secure-print specifications the bank adopted for higher denominations from the late 1990s onward.