1 Won Tiger

North Korea's foreign exchange coinage of the early 2000s was produced almost entirely for export — these brass issues circulated among collectors and curiosity buyers outside the DPRK rather than within it. Domestic transactions by that point operated through a parallel system largely divorced from coined money, a consequence of the economic collapse following Soviet aid cutoffs in 1991.

KM#238 belongs to a wave of collector-targeted issues released through state trading companies, the hard currency proceeds going directly to Pyongyang.