10 Dollars Mao Zedong

Liberia's Central Bank issued a long-running series of foreign leader commemoratives throughout the 1990s — a frankly unusual practice driven almost entirely by the international collector market rather than any domestic political purpose. Mao appears here alongside figures from Napoleon to Reagan in what was essentially a revenue program for a country then deep in the wreckage of the First Liberian Civil War, which had displaced roughly half the population by 1996.

These coins never circulated in Liberia. The $10 face value was notional.