5000 Won Donpyo

North Korea's "donpyo" (돈표) certificates occupy a strange bureaucratic space — they are not general circulation currency but internal exchange instruments, historically tied to access to foreign-currency shops and specific distribution systems. By 2021, the North Korean state had been issuing updated donpyo series with increasing frequency, partly in response to the near-complete dollarization of its informal markets, where Chinese yuan and US dollars had displaced the won for most transactions of any size.

A 5,000-won face value is nominally significant on paper but largely symbolic given the gap between official and market exchange rates.