10 Yuan Wolfgang Von Goethe

Issued as part of China's ongoing commemorative program for Western cultural figures, this piece appeared in 1992 on the 160th anniversary of Goethe's death. The People's Bank had been producing silver commemoratives with some regularity since the early 1980s, and issues dedicated to foreign literary figures — Shakespeare, Einstein, Beethoven — formed a recognizable subset aimed squarely at the international collector market rather than domestic circulation.

Mintages for this series were tightly controlled and official figures have not always been independently verified.