25 Pyas

Burma's post-independence coinage was issued under considerable institutional uncertainty — the new Union government inherited colonial monetary infrastructure from British Burma while simultaneously attempting to build a nationally distinct currency system. The 1952 series, of which this piece is a part, was produced well before the 1962 coup that brought Ne Win to power and set Burma on its long path of economic isolation. Coins from the later years of this range, struck after the military takeover, circulated under a government already dismantling the market economy they were designed to serve.