500 Won Tiger

North Korea's foreign-currency commemorative program, active through the 1990s, was explicitly designed to generate hard currency from Western collectors while remaining entirely outside the domestic economy — ordinary North Korean citizens had no access to, and no use for, silver proof issues denominated in Won. KM#106 was produced for export through state trading intermediaries, a practice that gave Pyongyang plausible distance from direct commercial engagement with capitalist markets.

The Amur tiger, nearly extinct on the Korean peninsula by the mid-twentieth century due to Japanese colonial-era hunting campaigns, carried enough nationalist resonance to make it a reliable seller abroad.