5000 Riels Khmer Republic

The Khmer Republic's silver issues of 1974 were produced in the final months before the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975. By that point the republic was militarily encircled, economically collapsed, and entirely dependent on American airlifts. These coins were never intended for circulation — they were struck for export sale and foreign exchange revenue at a moment when the government had almost no other means of generating hard currency. The Pol Pot regime that followed abolished money entirely, dynamited the National Bank of Cambodia, and destroyed most documentary records of the republic's final coinage programs.