The Kazakhstani tenge

Why Kazakhstan left the rouble zone

After the Soviet Union broke up, most of the former republics tried to keep the rouble. In September 1993 Kazakhstan signed a six-party agreement on a new rouble zone and a bilateral one with Russia on a unified monetary system. The conditions attached proved unacceptable to Kazakhstan, according to The Astana Times, and its leadership refused to take part. Wikipedia describes the countries left in the zone as pushed out once Russia exchanged its own banknotes. As Russia issued new notes, old Soviet money flooded into Kazakhstan.

On 5 November 1993 banks were barred from crediting Soviet cash to accounts, and such deposits were frozen until the origin of the money was checked. A decree of 12 November fixed the day. Citizens over 16 could exchange up to 100,000 roubles each, pensioners at post offices and workers at their workplaces.

How the first notes reached the country

A small group of artists designed the first notes in about two and a half months, in secret. Harrison & Sons in London printed the values from 1 to 100 tenge, and four IL-76 aircraft flew the money in over a week of 18 round trips, after which it waited in specially prepared underground warehouses until the banks received it. Because the notes showed historical figures, including Al-Farabi, Abai Kunanbayev and Abylai khan, they became known informally as the Portraits series.

Where the notes and coins are made

The Banknote Factory opened on 19 May 1995. Design and construction had run at the same time, and equipment went in while the finishing work was still under way; more than 83 million notes came out that first year. The National Bank's own specialists design the notes and coins. The bank dates the Kazakh Mint to 1992, built on the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk, with the first industrial batch of coins in 1993, whereas The Astana Times gives 1998 as the year the mint opened and says the earlier coins were struck in Germany.

How the banknote designs have changed

A 2006 series dropped the portraits for architecture and landscape, with a vertical front showing the Bayterek monument. Its first printing of the 2,000 and 5,000-tenge notes misspelled the Kazakh word for bank, a sensitive matter given the standing of the language. The 2006 notes of 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 tenge lost legal tender status on 3 October 2016, by which time a series dated 2011 to 2014 had already put the Kazakh Eli monument on the front. The Saka series, planned for 2023 to 2025, shrinks the notes and drops Russian from them.

Coins changed script in 2019. The metals stayed. The new designs moved the inscriptions from Cyrillic to Latin-based Kazakh, and the older Cyrillic coins remain legal tender. A bimetallic 200-tenge coin entered circulation in 2020.

What happened to the tiyn

The tenge divides into 100 tiyn. The first tiyn were paper. They were a stopgap until coins were ready, and bronze tiyn coins followed in 1993, struck with the national arms. They were withdrawn on 7 February 2001 and ceased to be legal currency on 31 December 2012, leaving 1 tenge as the lowest coin.

Where the name comes from

The name took time. Wikipedia traces the word tenge, meaning balance or scales in most Turkic languages, to the Mongolic teng and the Chinese děng, being equal. The Astana Times gives a different account: the name joins dengue and tanga, names of small Turkic coins. Aksha, altyn and som were also on the list of candidate names before the choice fell on tenge.