50 Won International Friendship Exhibition

The International Friendship Exhibition is a sprawling complex built into Mount Myohyang, north of Pyongyang, housing gifts presented to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il by foreign dignitaries and heads of state. By the mid-1990s it contained well over 100,000 items. This coin was struck in 1995, the same year Kim Il-sung's death triggered a mandatory three-year mourning period that effectively froze North Korean public life — and during which the famine known as the Arduous March was beginning to kill an estimated hundreds of thousands of people.

North Korean commemoratives of this period were minted almost exclusively for hard-currency export, not domestic circulation.