10 Dollars Greenwich Meridian

Liberia's prolific commemorative coinage program of the late 1990s and early 2000s was largely driven by a licensing arrangement with a German firm, Boyko, producing coins that had little connection to Liberian history or commerce. This piece, marking the Greenwich Meridian, fits squarely in that category — a coin conceived for the international collector market around the millennium, not for circulation in Monrovia.

The Greenwich Meridian itself was fixed at its current longitude by international agreement at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., where 22 of 25 nations voted to adopt the line passing through the Royal Observatory as the global prime meridian. France held out and continued using the Paris Meridian on official maps until 1911.