100 Riels, National Bank of Cambodia, 2001

The smallest workaday note of early-2000s Cambodia, issued by the National Bank of Cambodia — the central bank that was rebuilt through the 1990s after the Khmer Rouge years, when money had been abolished entirely and the old bank building in Phnom Penh blown up. By 2001 the riel was a stable, if minor, currency living alongside the US dollar that still dominates large transactions in Cambodia.

The face is dominated by the Independence Monument (Vimean Ekareach), the lotus-bud tower that Vann Molyvann designed in a modern Khmer idiom and raised in 1958 to mark the end of French rule; its tiers bristle with the heads of the multi-headed naga, the serpent that guards Khmer temples and lines their causeways. The reverse turns to the future rather than the past, showing a school and pupils — education as the promise of the rebuilt nation. The note is signed by Governor Chea Chanto, the long-serving head of the bank through this period.