20 Dollars - Elizabeth II Lady of the Century

Issued the year before her death, this coin was part of a wave of Commonwealth commemoratives anticipating Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's centenary — still four years away in 2000. Tuvalu, a Pacific microstate with a population then under 10,000, had no independent monetary tradition of its own; its commemorative program existed almost entirely as a revenue mechanism through collector sales rather than circulation.

The 155.5g specification places this firmly in the five-troy-ounce category, a format popular with Pacific island issuers throughout the 1990s for its bullion appeal to the Asian collector market.