Banknotes: How they represent a country's focus...

I'm going up to Malaysia with a bunch of Army friends tomorrow and changed RM400 at The Arcade at Raffles Place a few days ago. The money changer passed me 8x new RM50 notes.

Interestingly enough, I'm currently on this book called Malaysian Maverick by Barry Wain:

We look at the posterior side of the old RM50 note:

And the new RM50 note:

The posterior side of the old RM50 note showed heavy industry whilst the new RM50 notes show plam tree and agriculture.

In the book by Barry Wain, he mentioned that Mahathir was obsessed about having a heavy industry sector in Malaysia and pushed ahead, resulting in somewhat disastrous results as the Japanese (Mitsubishi Motors, Sumitomo Heavy Industry etc. ) exploited the cheap labor and costs without much technological transfer.

In the 1980s, he also declared agriculture and commodity as dead sectors.

However, this reversed under Abdullah Badawi and subsequently Najib Razak.

Interesting how a symbolic change of banknotes has so much history behind it!