1 Dollar Chinese Unicorn

Sierra Leone's late-1990s bullion and collector series was produced almost entirely for the export market — these coins never meaningfully circulated domestically in a country then sliding toward the worst phase of its decade-long civil war. The Chinese Unicorn dollar belongs to a category of issues where the issuing nation's name is largely incidental, with production and distribution handled entirely by outside minting agencies targeting Asian collector markets.

The qilin motif was a deliberate commercial calculation aimed at Hong Kong and mainland Chinese buyers in the years immediately surrounding the 1997 handover.