20 Won Year of the Ox

North Korea's lunar calendar commemorative series was produced almost entirely for the international collector market — hard currency the regime badly needed, with domestic circulation never the intent. The "Year of the Ox" pieces were struck in 2009 under the same foreign-exchange logic that drove Pyongyang to mint dozens of collector issues through the late 1990s and 2000s, often contracting production to mints in China and Eastern Europe.

KM# 1109 sits in a crowded field of DPRK brass commemoratives from this period, many sharing the same planchet specifications across different nominal denominations.