1000 Francs CFA Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin

The Republic of the Congo issued this piece in 1997 as part of a broader wave of commemorative coinage from central African franc-zone states that were, by that decade, openly licensing their minting authority to European distributors targeting collector markets. The coins had no meaningful domestic circulation and were produced specifically for export sale — a practice that drew quiet criticism from the Banque des États de l'Afrique Centrale.

Zeppelin himself died in 1917, months before the armistice that effectively ended the military airship program he had built from a single prototype flight in 1900 over Lake Constance.