20 Won Year of the Rabbit

North Korea has issued commemorative coinage for foreign hard currency since the 1970s, a program designed explicitly to extract convertible currency from collectors abroad while domestic circulation remained a separate, tightly controlled system. These pieces never entered North Korean pockets. The Year of the Rabbit places this within a broader lunar calendar series that Pyongyang minted aggressively in the late 2000s and early 2010s, targeting the Chinese collector market specifically — a calculated appeal to a neighboring population with both disposable income and deep cultural investment in zodiac commemoration.