500 Won

North Korea's 1998 currency reform was one of the more opaque monetary events of that decade — the stated rationale was modernization, but the redenomination and reissue program served equally well as a mechanism for the state to assess and effectively tax undeclared private savings. The won series of which this note is part was produced under conditions of severe economic contraction following the famine years of the mid-1990s, when an estimated hundreds of thousands died and the public distribution system had largely collapsed.

The "W" prefix in the Pick reference denotes the specialist Won catalog rather than the main Pick sequence — a cataloging distinction that reflects just how isolated North Korean numismatic documentation remained through the 1990s and into the 2000s.