North Korean Bills

Did they counterfeit their own bills? I thought they just kept to US $100
I have no idea.

 

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It only seems backwards because you are accustomed to reading modern Korean which is written left-to-right. Koreans living at the time these notes were issued would have been accustomed to reading bank notes from right to left.

You will notice that these older Korean bank notes are written primarily in Chinese characters. In fact, there is very little Korean (Hangul) on these notes. Only the name of the country, denomination and a few particles are written in Hangul.

Like Chinese characters, Hangul can be just as easily understood whether written left-to-right or right-to-left. Of course, that is not the case with English.

Prior to the issuance of these notes, Korean bank notes were written entirely in Chinese characters as were the bank notes used during the Japanese occupation. If you look at Chinese or Japanese bank notes from this and earlier periods, you will see that they are all written with Chinese characters and read right-to-left.

This is because traditional Chinese was written right-to-left. If the Chinese is written in columns, such as the right side on the obverse of these notes, then one would start with the far right column, read down, then move to the next column to the left, read down, and so forth.

Therefore, Koreans would have been used to reading right to left even as Hangul first began to appear on notes following the war. This is the reason the Hangul on these notes is written right-to-left.

Once the decision was made to use only Hangul and no Chinese characters, there was no longer a reason to continue to write in the traditional Chinese manner of top to bottom and right to left.

Gary

 

:foot-mouth:
A few of fearless leaders notes....

 

Gary - Holy crap I'm an idiot. Rookie mistake on my part. Thanks!
Ripley - Nice bills. I especially like the Juche one

In other somewhat related news: The Onion has named Kim Jong Eun as 2012's sexiest man alive. Chinese newspapers picked up the story as legit and posted it all over there news sites

 

haha!