500 Tenge Tigerhead Sculpture

Issued as part of Kazakhstan's sustained push through the mid-2000s to establish a presence in the international collector coin market, this piece draws on the Amur tiger — a species whose range once extended into the Kazakh steppe before twentieth-century habitat loss reduced it to isolated pockets of the Russian Far East. The gilding applied over .925 silver was a deliberate production choice, not decorative afterthought; the National Bank contracted selective gilding technology specifically to differentiate its wildlife series from comparable issues flooding the market at the time.

KM#62 is among the earlier catalogue entries for Kazakhstan's numismatic program, which only gained serious international traction after 2000.