50 Yuan Panda

The Panda series has carried an annually changing reverse design since 1983 — a deliberate policy that transformed these coins into a de facto annual collectible program and drove Western investor demand through the 1980s and 1990s. The 2006 issue was among the last struck before the People's Bank abandoned the familiar fractional weight system in favor of metric gram weights, a shift completed by 2016 that rendered the older troy-based fractions a closed set.