25 Riyals - Jan Palach

Ajman, smallest of the Trucial States, issued a flood of gold commemoratives in the late 1960s and early 1970s that were never intended to circulate — produced almost entirely for the European collector and investor markets, often through arrangements with foreign minting houses. This Jan Palach issue appeared roughly a year after the Czech student set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 to protest the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion, his death triggering mass public mourning that the Czechoslovak government struggled to suppress.

The choice of subject by a Persian Gulf sheikhdom with no conceivable connection to Cold War Czechoslovakia reflects the purely commercial logic driving these issues.