20 Kip Anniversary of the PDR

The 1985 issue marks the tenth anniversary of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, proclaimed on December 2, 1975, following the Pathet Lao's consolidation of power after the fall of Vientiane. The newly established socialist government had spent much of its first decade dismantling the royal monetary system and aligning its financial institutions with Soviet and Vietnamese models.

Collector-oriented issues like this one were largely produced for the export market through the Vorderasiatische Münzhandlung and similar intermediaries, seeing negligible domestic circulation in a country where hard currency was tightly controlled.