30 Won Year of the Rooster

North Korea has issued commemorative bimetallic pieces for the Chinese zodiac calendar with some regularity since the early 2000s, targeting the collector export market rather than domestic circulation — hard currency, not people's currency. The 2011 Rooster issue falls in this category entirely. These pieces were never intended to pass through North Korean hands.

KM#1304 is one of several dozen low-mintage zodiac types produced under the Central Bank's foreign exchange program, a scheme dating to the 1980s whereby Pyongyang generated convertible currency through numismatic exports while the domestic won remained inconvertible and tightly controlled.