5 Riels

This note was issued in the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge period, when the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea needed to reintroduce a monetary system from nothing. The Pol Pot regime had abolished money entirely in 1975 — banks were demolished, currency was destroyed, and financial infrastructure was systematically erased. The 1979 series, of which P#29 is part, was printed before the new state had fully consolidated control, making the circumstances of its distribution genuinely chaotic.

The National Bank of Cambodia had to be reconstituted from scratch, staffed largely by survivors with no institutional continuity to draw from.