1 Won Kim Il-sung's Arch of Triumph

Issued the year before Kim Il-sung's 76th birthday, this coin commemorates the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang — completed in 1982 and built specifically to mark his 70th birthday, making it six years older than this piece. The arch was deliberately constructed two meters taller than its Parisian counterpart. North Korea rarely released commemorative coinage for domestic circulation; most hard-currency issues from this period were minted explicitly for export sale to foreign collectors, generating foreign exchange the regime desperately needed under worsening Soviet subsidy conditions.