1 Kyat, Central Bank of Myanmar

The obverse carries no ruler, only a chinthe — the leonine temple guardian that sits in pairs at the foot of Burmese pagoda stairways. When the Central Bank of Myanmar replaced the Union Bank of Burma, it dropped portraiture entirely and put this mythical lion on the face of every note in the series, this 1-kyat being the smallest of them.

The note belongs to a deliberate return to normality. The country was renamed from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, and the central bank was reconstituted under the Central Bank of Myanmar Law of 1990. It issued conventional decimal denominations — 1, 5, 10, 20 kyat and upward — in place of the strange notes of the Ne Win years, when the government demonetised the 25-, 35- and 75-kyat notes in September 1987 and issued 45- and 90-kyat notes instead, denominations chosen because they were divisible by nine. That overnight cancellation wiped out ordinary savings and helped ignite the 1988 uprising.

The reverse shows the National Regatta on Kandawgyi (Royal) Lake in Yangon, long, slender racing boats drawn up on the water with the lakeside pavilions behind — a scene of festival rather than politics, printed in the soft greens of the note.