500 Kyats Year of the Tiger

Myanmar's 1998 commemorative program coincided with one of the country's most internationally isolated periods — the SLORC junta had renamed the country from Burma just a decade prior, and foreign exchange was tightly controlled. These silver issues were effectively never intended for domestic circulation; they were produced for the collector export market as a hard-currency earner at a time when the official kyat exchange rate bore almost no relation to reality.