diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index f33a23a9a0..76f9afbc2a 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-## 1.10.0 (Unreleased)
+## v1.9.0-rc1
 
 EXPERIMENTS:
 
diff --git a/version/VERSION b/version/VERSION
index 81c871de46..3ee29fa1b4 100644
--- a/version/VERSION
+++ b/version/VERSION
@@ -1 +1 @@
-1.10.0
+v1.9.0-rc1