10 Won Seongkyunkwan

Issued by the DPRK's Central Bank in 2010, this piece was part of a broader run of commemorative brass coins targeting the international collector market — a hard-currency revenue stream North Korea developed methodically from the 1980s onward. Seongkyunkwan, the Joseon-era Confucian academy in what is now Seoul, sits on the southern side of the DMZ, making its appearance on a North Korean coin a pointed claim to shared Korean cultural heritage. Pyongyang has consistently framed such pre-partition institutions as belonging to all Koreans.