10 Kyat, Central Bank of Myanmar

The obverse, printed chiefly in purple, carries the series chinthe — the temple-guardian lion that the Central Bank of Myanmar used in place of a portrait on every denomination, with a chinthe head as the watermark.

The note dates from the decimal currency the renamed country issued through the 1990s. Burma was renamed Myanmar in 1989, and the Central Bank of Myanmar was constituted under the 1990 central-bank law, returning the country to ordinary denominations of 1, 5, 10 and 20 kyat and above. This reversed the monetary chaos of the Ne Win era: in September 1987 the government demonetised the 25-, 35- and 75-kyat notes overnight and brought in 45- and 90-kyat notes instead — amounts divisible by nine, a figure Ne Win favoured — destroying much of the public's cash savings and feeding the unrest that erupted in 1988.

The reverse shows the Karaweik, the ornate royal barge moored on Kandawgyi Lake in Yangon. Modelled on a mythical bird and built in gilded, pavilioned form, the Karaweik is one of the city's best-known landmarks and a symbol of Burmese royal pageantry.