1 Won Year of the Horse

North Korea's zodiac coinage program, launched in the late 1990s, was aimed squarely at the foreign collector market rather than domestic circulation — hard currency was the objective, not numismatic tradition. The brass composition and relatively generous diameter place this firmly in that export-driven series, produced with collector sets in mind from the outset.

2002 was the Year of the Horse under the sexagenary cycle, corresponding also to Juche 91 in the DPRK's state calendar, which counts from Kim Il-sung's 1912 birth year.