10 Won Austrian Schilling

This piece belongs to a series of North Korean collector issues that repurposed the coinage designs of foreign nations — in this case, Austria — for hard currency export. The DPRK began issuing silver and base-metal commemoratives aggressively from the 1990s onward, targeting Western coin dealers and collectors as a source of foreign exchange the regime could not obtain through conventional trade. The Austrian Schilling itself had ceased to be legal tender by January 2002 when the euro replaced it, making this issue a commemorative of a currency that was already extinct at the time of striking.