500 Kip Panthera Tigris

Part of a wave of small-format gold wildlife issues produced for Laos by European minting contractors — likely Berna or a comparable Swiss/Austrian house — primarily targeting the collector market rather than any domestic circulation. Laos has issued these fractional gold pieces with some regularity since the 1990s, almost entirely for export sale through numismatic distributors. The Indochinese tiger, already functionally extinct in Laos by the time this was struck, lends the issue a grim ecological footnote.