700 Won Arirang Mass Games

The Arirang Mass Games — revived in 2002 after a decade-long hiatus and renamed from the older "May Day Stadium Games" — were staged that year partly to mark Kim Il-sung's 90th birth anniversary and to project national cohesion during a period of acute food insecurity following the famine years of the mid-1990s. North Korea simultaneously issued a wave of gold and silver commemoratives through state trading companies, targeting foreign collectors and hard currency rather than domestic circulation. These pieces never passed through North Korean hands in any transactional sense.