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The Vietnamese dong – one of the world’s highest denominated currencies

February 12, 2017 By James Clark 20 Comments

The Vietnamese dong - one of the world's highest denominated currency

The dong (…) is the currency of Vietnam, and at the time of this post 1 US dollar was equal to 22701.48 Vietnamese dong (VND). The dong has the distinction of being one of the world’s highest denominated currency.

The world’s highest denominated banknote (as opposed to the world’s highest-value notes) is the 500,000 dong note. With just two of these you are a dong millionaire.

500000 dong

Every month I have a fistful of dong as I go to pay the rent in cash. Many Vietnamese banks only allow 2 million dong withdrawals, though if you find a Citibank you can withdraw 8 million in one transaction. My first month I spent about 16 million dong.

10 million dong

Etymology

The word đồng derives from the Chinese tóng qián, which refers to Chinese bronze coins from the dynastic periods of China and Vietnam.

In Vietnamese a “d” with a strike through it (đ) is a hard d, while a regular d is soft, sounding like y or z, depending on which pronunciation of Vietnamese you use. For the purpose of this article đồng has been anglicized to dong.

The currency symbol is ₫.

Other highly denominated currencies

The previous highest denomination record-holder was the Zimbabwean dollar (ZWL), which reached $10(14) (somewhere in the trillions) before the currency was disbanded in 2009. Zimbabwe now uses other currencies, including the United States dollar, South African rand, Botswana pula, Pound sterling, Indian rupee, Euro, Japanese yen, and Chinese yuan.

The highest denominated currency is the Iranian Rial, which was trading at 35240.00 for 1 USD at the time of this post.

Currently the unofficial rate of the Venezuelan bolívar (VEF) is running at 4300 per dollar and rising fast, so maybe it will take the crown soon unless it is disbanded.

Note that the Vietnamese dong is relatively stable (or at least rising in line with other currencies of Southeast Asia), so the comparison of numerical denomination with Zimbabwe and Venezuela is not a comparison of economies (more on that below).

A better comparison would be with Indonesia, which is also a rapidly developing nation on a similar trajectory to Vietnam. The Indonesian rupiah (IDR) is the world’s second highest denominated currency. The rupiah is just over 13,000 to 1 USD, and to be a rupiah millionaire you need $75 USD.

The 1 dong note that got me thinking about the dong

I was in Saigon having coffee with a friend and his wife, and she produced a single dong note from her purse. My eyes lit up with curiosity when I saw it. I doubt she has ever seen a man so excited to see a dong, so she said I could have it. I don’t know if it’s a cultural faux pas to accept a dong from a friends wife, but I’ll take it.

Viet Nam 1 Dong

In 2017 money a single dong is worth 0.000044 USD. Or to put it another way, you would need 22701 of these to make 1 US dollar. Needless to say, you never see a 1 dong note in circulation.

Dong shower thoughts

If the dong was Australian a 1 dong note would be called a “donger”. There is a campaign in Australia to rename our dollar the dollarydoo, named after a Simpsons episode. If when Australia becomes a republic maybe we should also be re-evaluating the name of our currency. It could be a dollarydoo, or it could indeed be a donger. With over twenty currencies using the name dollar, we should break free with a new flag and new currency identity.

The smallest note I have seen in circulation is the 200 dong note. I occasionally get 500 dong notes from the supermarket, but the most common small note is 1000, which is .044 cents (it’s the nickel of Vietnamese currency, but in note form).

Puzzled over when a solitary dong would have been worth something, I looked it up and found that the Viet Nam 1 Dong is from 1985 from the second dong series.

A brief history of the dong

After WWII, North and South Vietnam replaced the French Indochinese piastre with the North Vietnamese dong and the South Vietnamese dong. At the end of the war in 1975, the South Vietnamese dong was replaced by the liberation dong (which gets my vote as the best name for a currency ever). The two dongs were unified in 1978, becoming the first dong. In 1985 the dong was revaluated (second dong) with 1 new dong equal to 10 old dong.

The 1 dong note I have is from this era, with 500 dong being the largest note printed at the time. The new dong also marks the beginning of rampant inflation, which can be seen from this historical graph by fxtop.com.

Dong rates from 1983 to 2017

In 1986 the rate was 1USD/23VND, then by 1987 it was 78VND, 630VND in 1988, and 4500VND in 1989.

Dong inflation

In 2003 Vietnam introduced plastic polymer banknotes (which was first used by the Reserve Bank of Australia), which is now used for notes from 10,000 and above.

My first visit to Vietnam was in 2005, when the dong was worth 15,000. At that point US dollars were still circulating as an alternative currency. I had arrived from Cambodia where the US dollar was (and still is) the defacto currency, so I was using USD for much of that first trip.

Today, shops are no longer allowed to advertise in USD or accept USD as payment. If you ask nicely I’m sure shops will any form of currency, but officially its illegal.

Future redenomination of the Dong

Despite having more zero’s than any other currency, there has been no mention of the currency being redenominated (rededonginated?)

In my search for news articles relating to a future redenomination, the only articles I found were related to dodgy websites that were promoting the Iraqi Dinar revaluation scam.

Indonesia have been talking about redenomination for years, but knowing Indonesia they will still be talking about it for years to come. The plan there is to remove three zeroes from the currency, so the current Rp 1,000 note (about .75 cents USD) would be Rp1.

With Vietnam being proclaimed as ASEAN’s ‘Silicon Valley’, and being on track to becoming the 20th biggest economy in 2050, redenomination would make sense.

knocking off four zeros would turn a 20,000 dong note into a 2 dong note, so 1 USD would equal about 2 VND. The current notes would then convert as follows:

500 = 0.05
1,000 = 0.10
2,000 = 0.20
5,000 = 0.50
10,000 = 1
20,000 = 2
50,000 = 5
100,000 = 10
200,000 = 20
500,000 = 50

With a redenomination you could then reintroduce coins (there are some rarely-seen coins in circulation), though if Vietnam plan to go cashless by 2020 then maybe coins will be redundant.

Vietnamese Dong – News and further reading

What the Big Mac index says about the dollar and the dong – [23/07/21]

Filed Under: Travel Blog Tagged With: currency, vietnam

Comments

  1. Jub says

    February 12, 2017 at 12:04 pm

    Haha that was quite a fun, random read. Belarusian was the most annoying currency for me, the 200 ruble and 20,000 ruble notes were both green! They just redenominated the currency in the last year, yay.

    Reply
  2. Colin Newcomer says

    February 14, 2017 at 2:58 am

    Using the Dong is one of my favorite parts about living in Vietnam. You’re a millionaire the first time you hit an ATM!

    Reply
  3. Louise says

    February 16, 2017 at 6:03 am

    If you’ve dreamt of becoming a millionaire, going to Vietnam is the best thing to do. I do love Vietnam.

    Reply
  4. Alex Steven says

    February 16, 2017 at 12:02 pm

    Hahaha this is funny. Vietnam is a beautiful place to go to. Nice read.

    Reply
  5. Mal says

    February 16, 2017 at 1:27 pm

    Wonderful post! And very nice explanation the dong currency note.

    Reply
  6. Beno says

    February 16, 2017 at 6:46 pm

    What an amazing topic written in a funny way. Thanks for your informations about Vietnamese dong.

    Reply
  7. Ronnie Walter says

    February 17, 2017 at 12:12 pm

    Nice read! Vietnam is amazing and the Dong story really funny.

    Reply
  8. Tarin says

    March 19, 2017 at 3:11 pm

    Thank you to tell us so much useful information. I’m glad to read it.

    Reply
  9. Adonis Villanueva says

    March 21, 2017 at 1:23 am

    Ding Dong, funny read! You’d think they would do something about changing the denomination 🙂

    Reply
  10. Curtis says

    April 21, 2017 at 6:19 am

    Man that was very entertaining and at the same time informative.

    Reply
  11. Hjk says

    October 30, 2018 at 2:13 am

    So if the dong goes 1 for 1 us dollar and you have 500,000 dong you are rich with 500 thousand dollars.. .

    Reply
    • James Clark says

      October 30, 2018 at 4:06 am

      Technically yes, but if the dollar has dropped in value that much then there would be a worldwide calamity.

      Reply
      • Vicki Curtin says

        February 23, 2022 at 12:41 am

        Where can you buy the dong that is authentic

        Reply
  12. brendafdez says

    March 11, 2019 at 11:40 am

    > which is .044 cents
    No, you verizonmathist you, it’s 4.4 cents. It’s not the same.

    Reply
  13. Marie Hollman says

    March 18, 2020 at 7:42 pm

    Would you advise a US CITIZEN TO INVEST IN THE VIETNAMESE DONG

    Reply
  14. Dave says

    August 26, 2020 at 9:23 pm

    Thanks for the great read! Loved it 😀 I’ve had a couple folks ask me what I thought about how a rededongination (thanks for that one!) would impact the exchange value of existing Dongs. To me, it seems it would make them worth less in exchange to USD than they are worth now. Not surprisingly, these are the same folks looking to see a rededinarination (gotta borrow that from you) and it seems the same thing would apply there.

    Thoughts?

    Reply
    • James Clark says

      August 27, 2020 at 1:35 am

      Thanks Dave,

      if there was a redenomination then the old dongs would only be exchangeable for new dongs at a bank, and the value would move with the new dong/USD rate. So if there was a 4 zero redenomination, you would take your old 10,000 dong note to the bank and get a 1 dong note in return.

      Reply
  15. joel melin says

    January 30, 2021 at 4:30 pm

    no comments

    Reply
  16. Carol holmes says

    May 30, 2022 at 2:28 pm

    What is the true , value of the possibility, the Vietnamese Dong. Thank you so much

    Reply
  17. Kelsey Jones says

    January 8, 2023 at 7:27 pm

    I have found many Dong images on Banknotes.com

    Reply

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Hi, I’m James Clark, and I've been travelling the world since 2003 while running a location independent travel business. Nomadic Notes is a travel blog featuring travel guides and notes from my travels.

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