This brief brass issue was discontinued after just two years when South Korea undertook a currency reform that shifted the 1 Won to aluminum — a change driven not by monetary policy but by raw material costs. The brass composition made the coin worth more as metal than as currency almost immediately after issue, an accelerating problem as Korean industrialization drove up domestic demand for copper and zinc alloys through the mid-1960s.
This brief brass issue was discontinued after just two years when South Korea undertook a currency reform that shifted the 1 Won to aluminum — a change driven not by monetary policy but by raw material costs. The brass composition made the coin worth more as metal than as currency almost immediately after issue, an accelerating problem as Korean industrialization drove up domestic demand for copper and zinc alloys through the mid-1960s.