1 Won SISCE 1997

North Korea issued a series of collector-oriented aluminum won pieces in the late 1990s under the SISCE designation — Sistema Internacional de Coleccionistas de Sellos y Coleccionables Especiales — a Spanish-language collectibles marketing program that distributed North Korean coins internationally during a period when the country had virtually no legitimate trade relationships. The coins were never intended to circulate domestically.

KM#541 belongs to a sprawling family of types produced specifically for hard-currency export revenue, a strategy Pyongyang leaned on heavily following the collapse of Soviet aid in the early 1990s.