4 000 000 Lira Silk Route - Uygur

Issued as part of Turkey's multi-year Silk Road commemorative program, this piece honors the Uyghur Khaganate, the Turkic empire that controlled Central Asian trade routes from roughly 744 to 840 AD before its collapse under Yenisei Kyrgyz pressure. Turkey's inclusion of Uyghur history in a national commemorative series reflects the pan-Turkic cultural politics of the late 1990s, when Ankara was actively cultivating ties with Turkic-speaking peoples across the former Soviet republics and Xinjiang.

The Silk Road series ran across multiple denominations and years, with most issues seeing limited secondary market activity outside specialist collectors of Turkish modern commemoratives.