🇮🇩Indonesian Rupiah (IDR)

The name comes from the Sanskrit rupya, meaning wrought silver, the same root as the Indian rupee. The republic issued its first rupiah in 1946, during the independence struggle, as much a claim of sovereignty as a monetary act: accepting the new notes instead of Dutch-issued money was a political choice. Competing regional issues, including separate rupiah for the Riau islands and for western New Guinea, survived into the 1960s before the currency was unified. Bank Indonesia took its present form in 1953, from the nationalised De Javasche Bank.

The rupiah lost most of its value during the 1997 and 1998 crisis, and the collapse was one of the events that ended the Suharto era. Prices have carried the extra digits ever since. Removing three zeros has been proposed repeatedly and debated in parliament for more than a decade, but no redenomination has been enacted, so amounts stay long and Indonesians abbreviate them in writing, with rb for thousands and jt for millions. For anyone converting, the practical consequence is that decimals in a rupiah figure are meaningless: nothing smaller than a rupiah exists in circulation.

The rupiah is the sole legal tender across Indonesia's provinces, and Indonesian law requires transactions settled inside the country to be made in rupiah rather than in foreign currency.