2 Won Candle Island

North Korea's foreign-currency coin program, active from the 1970s onward, produced issues specifically for visiting diplomats, foreign workers, and the hard-currency shops that ordinary citizens were barred from entering. These pieces circulated — if they circulated at all — entirely outside the domestic won system, which was subject to periodic redenomination and forced exchange schemes that wiped out private savings. Candle Island, a small rocky formation off the western coast, appears in several of these commemorative issues as part of a broader series promoting domestic geography to foreign audiences.

KM#975 is a late entry in that program, by which point North Korea had been issuing collector-targeted coinage for foreign exchange for nearly three decades.