500 Tögrög Great Wall

Issued under Mongolia's ongoing commemorative silver program, this piece marks a geopolitical curiosity: the Great Wall was built largely to keep Mongol and proto-Mongol steppe peoples out, yet here it appears on a coin struck by the direct institutional successor of the Mongol state. The Wall's construction under the Qin and Han dynasties was a direct response to raids by the Xiongnu — a confederation many historians link, however contested, to ancestral Mongol peoples.