1 Won Kim Il Sung

Issued the year North Korea formally enshrined the Songun — "military-first" — policy into state doctrine, this brass piece was produced for a collector market that Pyongyang had been cultivating since the 1970s as a hard currency revenue stream. The DPRK's numismatic export program, run through state trading companies, generated foreign exchange at a time when the country was emerging from the catastrophic famine of the late 1990s that killed an estimated 600,000 to one million people.

Domestic circulation of this denomination was largely notional by 2001; the won's purchasing power had collapsed so thoroughly that informal markets denominated transactions in Chinese yuan and U.S. dollars.