100 Ngultrum

The Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan was established only in 1982, making the ngultrum itself a relatively young currency. The 2000 issue falls within a period when Bhutan was cautiously expanding its monetary infrastructure while maintaining the Indian rupee as legal tender alongside its own notes — a dual-currency arrangement that limited domestic demand for high-denomination ngultrum and kept actual circulation of this 100-unit note modest by most standards.

Thomas De La Rue's involvement is unsurprising; they held the Bhutanese printing contract across multiple series. For a nation with one of the smallest circulating note populations in Asia, the security specification on this issue is notably lean — watermark only, without the thread or color-shift features De La Rue was fitting into comparable small-nation contracts at the same time.