A well-researched article that touches areas I would never even have thought of. You relate how President Park Chung-hee operated his policy of directed industrialisation alongside his stiflingly oppressive rule, and how even the then relatively young South Korean Mint had much to learn in a period of a few short years. Astonishingly, the South Koreans had no concept of a commemorative coin, and you deal with how this fact was handled. Then again, it was to be a circulating commemorative, and a high denomination coin at that, higher than that of the existing circulation coins, and this at a time of rapid inflation, and you discuss those factors too.
After World War 2, South Korea was an impoverished agrarian country, but Park's policies laid the basis for the techno-industrial powerhouse we see today. It would have been useful to read a brief comparison with the development of North Korea. Astonishingly, for some years after 1950, North Korea surged ahead of South Korea, due to its neo-Stalinist policy of rapid industrialisation. Unlike South Korea, however, North Korea was unable to maintain that pace and has now fallen far behind.
My only other criticism centres on the fact that much of the text is in a very large font. For a long article, I found this very off-putting, therefore I copied whole chunks into a Word document and changed the font size from 18 to 12, to make it more readable.
All in all an excellent article, though. When and how did your interest in Korean coins start? I'm also curious about your nationality.
