500 Riels - Norodom Sihanouk Angkor Wat

Cambodia resumed commemorative coinage in the late 1990s after decades of interruption — the Khmer Rouge had abolished money entirely in 1975, evacuating cities and shutting the National Bank within days of taking Phnom Penh. This brass 500 Riels is part of the post-UNTAC recovery of Cambodian numismatic identity, issued under a National Bank that had itself only been reconstituted in the 1980s after the Vietnamese intervention ended Pol Pot's experiment in a moneyless agrarian state.

Sihanouk had abdicated in 2004 — this coin predates that — but his political rehabilitation following the Paris Peace Accords made him the natural face of national continuity.