Gold Kilo 2011 Amber Road, Coin from Niue - detailed information

Niue, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar is the circulation currency for daily transactions, while the government also authorises legal tender coins in the Niue Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

A number of mints issue a large variety of coins under the authority of Niue. Most of these are commemorative and collector issues dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to Niue itself. Others are bullion coins in sizes based on the troy ounce, or metric - including the extremely large one kilogram of gold format (abbreviated as 1 kg Au, where "Au" comes from the Latin word for gold, Aurum). These gold coins are targeted at bullion investors and are released at prices close to the intrinsic value of their precious metal content.

This coin is part of a series by the Mint of Poland commemorating the Amber Road connecting North Europe to Italy.

The Amber Road (or Amber Route) was an ancient trade route for the transfer of amber from the coastal areas of Sicily and later from the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Prehistoric trade routes between Northern and Southern Europe were defined by the amber trade. As an important commodity, sometimes dubbed "the gold of the north", amber was transported from the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts overland by way of the Vistula and Dnieper rivers to Italy, Greece, the Black Sea, Syria and Egypt over a period of thousands of years.