10 Won Kim Jong Suk

Kim Jong Suk — guerrilla fighter, first wife of Kim Il-sung, and mother of Kim Jong-il — died in 1949 and was elevated posthumously into the official DPRK pantheon as a revolutionary martyr. This issue almost certainly belongs to the hard-currency proof series North Korea produced throughout the 1990s and 2000s for foreign collectors, generating badly needed foreign exchange rather than serving any domestic monetary function. These coins were never intended to circulate inside the DPRK itself.

KM#386 sits in a crowded field of similar commemoratives from Pyongyang's export numismatic program, most distributed through European intermediaries.