The other day I posted about a walking liberty half-dollar I had picked up at the local coin shop. Go read about it. On that trip, I also picked up some paper money. As I wrote in this post, my youngest has recently become interested in banknotes. He's only 8 so this is not a monetary interest, he just likes the strange pictures and writing. I'm fine with encouraging this interest, so I've been slowly giving him random noes from around the world that students have given me in the past when coming back from trips.
Anyway, the last time I was at my coin shop, I noticed he had a bin with a bunch of banknotes. All low value, just random small notes that he is selling for a few yen each, probably more to encourage budding collectors like my son than to make money.
So I looked through and this one popped out at me as something he might like, so I bought it. Actually I bought two of them, since I thought my other son might also enjoy it.
This puts this more on the collectors side of this group than the silver stacking side. But I thought you guys might find enough interest here to enjoy this post.
I had never seen any Myanmar money before buying these and had no idea of the value. Yahoo.co.jp tells me it is only worth about ¥7 (roughly 5 cents). ChatGPT then tells me the value of this 1994 100 Kyats note is closer to $1 and could be up to $5 for uncirculated notes in pristine condition with a unique serial number. Numista, meanwhile, tells me that a more common price is probably in the range of $0.25 to $0.50. See here.
I'm assuming the coin shop wouldn't have sold a rare one, so if this specific note does have any value like ChatGPT claims, I'm guessing it is on the low end, closer to a quarter.
Yeah, so... worthless.
It is kind of a cool design. Both sides are cool, but especially that lion is nice. I don't know much about Burmese culture, but I suppose these guardian lions may have evolved into the guardian lion-dogs at Japanese shrines, the komainu dogs. I wrote a fairly detailed post about them here.
Anyway, an interesting—if worthless—banknote. Will the US dollar soon be in this category? Isn't it here already? Well...it's not quite this worthless, but it may be getting there soon.
I did pick up something else—silver and a coin, so I'll cover that next time.
