2500 Dollars Year of the Tiger, Type I

Liberia's high-denomination gold issues of the late 1990s were produced almost entirely for the international collector market — the country was in the midst of a devastating civil war, and these pieces had no meaningful domestic monetary function whatsoever. The Franklin Mint and affiliated private contractors handled much of this production, with Liberia lending its issuing authority to a broad program of commemorative coinage that generated foreign exchange revenue during a period when the government controlled little of its own territory.

The "Type I" designation distinguishes this strike from a subsequent variant, though documentation differentiating the two in auction records remains inconsistent.