1 Dollar - Elizabeth II Year of the Rat

Niue's ongoing lunar series is struck by the New Zealand Mint under licensing arrangements that allow the tiny Pacific island nation — with a population under 2,000 — to generate meaningful revenue through collector coinage it has no domestic infrastructure to produce itself. The Year of the Rat opened the third cycle of the 12-year Chinese zodiac sequence for this series.

The rat holds the first position in the zodiac partly due to a folk story in which it hitched a ride on the ox's back and leaped ahead at the finish line — a detail that made the animal's symbolic association with cunning and opportunism essentially permanent in East Asian tradition.