10 Won Giant Panda

North Korea's panda coinage from the late 1990s was produced almost entirely for export sale, never intended to circulate domestically. The DPRK began issuing collector coins through foreign distributors in the 1980s as a hard currency mechanism, with pieces like this routed through dealers in Germany, Austria, and Japan. The program had no domestic numismatic audience — it was purely a foreign exchange instrument during a period when the country was in the grip of a famine that killed an estimated 240,000 to 3.5 million people.

KM#138 shares its panda subject with Chinese Mint issues, a deliberate commercial decision to attract buyers already familiar with the popular Chinese Panda series.