500 Tenge Haloxylon

The saxaul — known locally as zheksau — is a leafless halophytic tree that holds the Eurasian steppe's shifting sands together, and its near-collapse under Soviet-era agricultural policy contributed directly to the Aral Sea disaster. Kazakhstan has issued a number of collector pieces in its ongoing nature conservation series, and this saxaul issue fits squarely within that program, struck in the year the country was still managing the long-term ecological fallout from one of the twentieth century's worst man-made environmental catastrophes.