20 Tögrög, Mongolbank

The maroon twenty-tögrög note belongs to Mongolbank's 1993 series, the first money of independent post-communist Mongolia, and shares its design language with the ten-tögrög: a portrait of Damdin Sükhbaatar (1893–1923), the revolutionary cavalry leader who drove out foreign forces in 1921 and founded the modern Mongolian state. His image, carried over from the socialist-era currency, anchors the face beside the Soyombo sovereignty emblem and the traditional vertical script.

The reverse turns to the land itself — a herd of horses before a range of mountains, the enduring emblem of Mongolia's nomadic herding economy. Like the rest of the series it was printed by Thomas De La Rue in London. The twenty-tögrög sits a step above the ten in the same portrait-and-landscape idiom, binding the founding hero of the republic to the pastoral country he fought for.