10 Tögrög, Mongolbank

This green ten-tögrög note is one of the larger, horizontally-read values of Mongolbank's 1993 series, the first currency of the post-communist republic. Where the little möngö and the one-tögrög note turned to traditional and Buddhist imagery, the working tögrög notes kept the figure every Mongolian knew from the socialist era: Damdin Sükhbaatar (1893–1923), the cavalry commander who led the 1921 revolution against Chinese occupation and White Russian forces and became the founding hero of modern Mongolia — the capital, Ulaanbaatar, bears his name.

His portrait in a peaked cap sits beside the Soyombo emblem on the face; the back opens onto a pastoral Mongolian landscape of mountains with a herd of horses grazing by water. The whole series was printed by Thomas De La Rue of London. The ten-tögrög kept the pre-reform portrait convention alive into the independent currency, pairing a revolutionary icon with the sovereignty emblem of the new state.