1 Won King Tangun and Tomb

Tangun — the mythological founder of the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon, said to have been born of a bear-woman and a divine father in 2333 BC — became a focal point of North Korean state ideology in the 1990s after the regime announced in 1993 that his supposed tomb had been discovered and "reconstructed" near Pyongyang. Archaeologists outside the DPRK were uniformly skeptical; the claimed skeletal remains conveniently confirmed the myth's chronology almost exactly.

The tomb complex was completed in 1994 and immediately absorbed into official Juche nationalist doctrine, giving this issue a specific propagandistic purpose rather than a numismatic one.