500 Won

South Korea's early won series of the 1960s was printed domestically at a time when many developing economies still sent their security printing abroad. The Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation handling this 500 Won issue was a deliberate policy choice — the Park Chung-hee government treated self-sufficient currency production as an industrial and security priority, part of the same logic driving the Five-Year Plans.

A print run of just over 12 million across a nine-year window is modest, and attrition from circulation in a rapidly industrializing economy was high. Fine or better examples are harder to source than the numbers suggest.