The Lao kip

Which kips came before this one

Three kips have followed one another. The royal kip of 1953 took over from the French Indochinese piastre at par, was divided into 100 att and was pegged to the French franc at ten francs to the kip. On 10 October 1958 its peg moved to the US dollar, with a devaluation, and a second devaluation followed on 1 January 1964. The official rate was abolished on 4 April 1972.

The Pathet Lao had meanwhile issued a kip of its own. Its liberation kip, introduced on 12 October 1968 for the areas the movement held, came in notes printed in China. In 1976 the new government replaced the royal kip with it at 20 royal kip to one, and confiscated much of the old money in the process: an individual could exchange up to 100,000 royal kip and a business up to one million, and anything above that had to be deposited in state-owned banks. On 16 December 1979 the present kip replaced the liberation kip at 100 to one.

Who issues the notes

The Bank of the Lao P.D.R., the central bank in Vientiane, issues the kip, holds the country's reserves and supervises its commercial banks. It succeeded the National Bank of Laos. That bank had in turn taken over in early 1955 from the Institut d'Émission des États du Cambodge, du Laos et du Viet-nam, the French-controlled issuer whose Laos branch put out the first kip notes in 1953, denominated in both piastres and kip. Notes in kip alone followed in 1957.

How the notes climbed to a hundred thousand

The 1979 series ran from 1 to 100 kip. Higher values were added one after another: 500 kip in 1988, 1,000 in 1992, 2,000 and 5,000 in 1997, 10,000 and 20,000 in 2002, and 50,000 on 17 January 2006, though the note is dated 2004. A 100,000-kip note first appeared on 15 November 2010 to mark 450 years since the founding of Vientiane.

On 1 February 2012 the central bank made the 100,000-kip note a regular issue. Its stated aim was to get people in Laos using their own currency instead of US dollars and Thai baht. As of 2019 no note below 500 kip was in common circulation.

Redesigned 10,000 and 20,000 notes were released in October, and new 50,000 and 100,000 notes in December 2022, all dated 2020 and carrying updated security features against counterfeiting. Each shows Kaysone Phomvihane, who died in 1992, on the front. The backs show the Lao-Nippon Bridge, the Theun-Hinboun hydropower station, the presidential palace and a view of Vieng Xai in Houaphanh province.

Why the coins are seldom seen

Laos struck coins only in 1952 under the royal kip: holed aluminium pieces of 10, 20 and 50 att. Twenty-eight years passed before the next ones, aluminium att coins of 1980 with the state emblem on one side and farming scenes on the other. Commemorative coins of 1 to 50 kip followed in 1985 for the tenth anniversary of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The economic blow of the Soviet collapse in 1991, and inflation that would not let go, left coins of either kind rarely seen in circulation, and the att is no longer in regular use.