500 Tenge Astana

Issued to mark the tenth anniversary of Astana as Kazakhstan's capital — a city relocated from Almaty in 1997 under Nursultan Nazarbayev's directive to shift the national center of gravity northward, partly to anchor Kazakh state presence in a region with a large ethnic Russian population. The move was controversial domestically and widely skeptical abroad, but the new capital grew with startling speed.

The 2008 date places this coin in a year when Astana's construction boom was still accelerating, funded substantially by oil revenues.