500 Won Environmental Protection

Issued in 1992 as part of North Korea's hard-currency foreign exchange program, this piece was never intended for domestic circulation. The DPRK produced numismatic silver issues throughout the late 1980s and 1990s almost exclusively for sale to foreign collectors through state-controlled trading companies, generating convertible currency the regime could not otherwise easily obtain.

KM#59 belongs to a cluster of thematic issues from this period targeting the international collector market on environmental subjects then fashionable in Western numismatics.