50 Kyats

Myanmar's Security Printing Works, established in Rangoon in the early 1970s, produced this note domestically at a time when the Ne Win government had made self-sufficiency a matter of policy as much as economics. The long production run — spanning two decades under the Burma Socialist Programme Party and then into the SLORC period — means the series bridges two distinct political regimes without a design change, which is itself telling.

Watermarking was the sole security measure, a notably thin specification by the standards of the period. Known forgeries circulated in border trade zones, particularly along the Thai frontier, where the kyat's artificial official exchange rate made black-market arbitrage profitable enough to justify the effort.