Gold has had a wild 2026. The metal peaked at a record $5,501.70 an ounce on January 29, fell below $4,000 by mid-July, and stood at $4,426.65 at the August 12 London fix. At prices like these, the heaviest gold coins ever made are worth staggering amounts as metal alone.
But the story of the world’s largest gold coins is bigger than bullion math. It runs from an Egyptian coin that paid Greek mercenaries 2,300 years ago, through a missing 26-pound Mughal masterpiece, to a modern one-ton monster that holds a Guinness World Record.
A note on the rankings: we ranked by total weight, and we counted only true coins, meaning pieces issued by a mint or sovereign with a monetary character. The giant gold medallions of ancient Rome, which were imperial gifts rather than money, get their own mention at the end.
No. 12: The Ptolemaic Mnaieion (Egypt, 270s to 260s BCE)
Weight: about 27.7 grams | Gold value today: about $3,900
Most ancient states struck gold sparingly. Ptolemaic Egypt mass-produced it. The mnaieion, an eight-drachm gold piece introduced under Ptolemy II, weighed nearly a full ounce of nearly pure gold and was valued at 100 silver drachms. It was the heaviest standard gold coin of the ancient world, and the Ptolemies used it for the things heavy money does best, like hiring mercenaries by the thousand. Museum specimens at the American Numismatic Society and Harvard weigh in at 27.6 to 27.8 grams.
No. 11: The Tensho Oban (Japan, 1588)
Weight: about 165 grams | Gold value today: about $17,000 in metal; one sold for $1.92 million in 2021
Japan’s oban is the coin that looks least like a coin: a hammered oval gold plate nearly 7 inches long, first produced in 1588 on the orders of warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi and made by the Goto family of goldsmiths. An oban had no fixed face value. It traded on its gold content, roughly 70 to 76 percent pure in the early era, and each piece carried a certification in black ink from the Goto master himself. Obans were gifts and rewards for samurai, not pocket change. Only about six examples of the original Tensho issue survive, and one brought $1.92 million at a Stack’s Bowers auction in April 2021.
No. 10: The 20-Stater of Eucratides I (Bactria, c. 170 to 145 BCE)
Weight: 169.2 grams | Gold value today: about $24,000 in metal; the coin itself is priceless
The largest surviving gold coin of classical antiquity was struck by a king most people have never heard of. Eucratides I ruled Greco-Bactria, a Hellenistic kingdom in what is now Afghanistan and Central Asia, and his unique 20-stater weighs 169.2 grams and spans 58 millimeters. Found near Bukhara in the 19th century, it was purchased by Emperor Napoleon III of France and now resides in the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. One coin, one specimen, no second chances for collectors.
No. 9: The 100-Ducat Giants of Europe (1621 to 1683)
Weight: about 346 to 349.5 grams each | Gold value today: about $49,000 in metal; auction records run to $2.99 million
Seventeenth-century European rulers turned the humble 3.49-gram ducat into a flex by striking presentation pieces of 100 ducats at once. Three stand out:
- Poland, 1621. Sigismund III Vasa’s 100-ducat piece (349.49 grams) celebrated victory over the Ottomans at Chocim. One specimen sold for $1.38 million at Stack’s in 2008, then $2.16 million at a CNG auction in 2018, and changed hands again in Oslo in 2025 for about $1.85 million.
- Bohemia, 1629. Ferdinand II’s 100-ducat piece (348.5 grams, 74 millimeters) was struck in Prague as a diplomatic gift during the Thirty Years’ War. Only about four are known. In November 2025, one sold at Numismatica Ars Classica in Zurich for about $2.99 million, reported as the most expensive post-antique European gold coin ever auctioned.
- Transylvania, 1674 to 1683. Prince Michael Apafi struck 100-ducat plates at Fogaras using an unusual shortcut on the early issues: pressing small 1-ducat and 10-ducat dies onto one huge blank. Every known example sits in a museum today.
The lesson of this tier: gold is the floor, not the price. These coins carry roughly $49,000 in metal and sell for 40 to 60 times that.
No. 8: Shah Jahan’s 100-Mohur (Mughal India, 1638-39)
Weight: 1,094.5 grams | Gold value today: about $153,000 in metal
The builder of the Taj Mahal also built serious coins. This 100-mohur presentation piece from the Lahore mint weighs over a kilogram and measures about 95 millimeters across. It was one of two giant Mughal coins offered at a famous 1987 Geneva auction, where bidding reached $2.8 million but failed to meet the reserve. It later sold privately and now resides in the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait. Remarkably, no genuine Mughal 100-mohur coin has ever actually sold at public auction.
No. 7: Shah Jahan’s 200-Mohur (Mughal India, 1654)
Weight: about 2,177 grams | Gold value today: about $304,000 in metal, if it still exists
Twice the coin, twice the mystery. The 200-mohur piece of 1654 weighed nearly 4.8 pounds and measured 131 millimeters, roughly the diameter of a CD. The original was last seen in India in the 1840s and was probably melted down long ago. All that survives is an electrotype copy in the British Museum, a 19th-century replica of a coin nobody alive has ever seen.
No. 6: The Modern 10-Kilo Club (2007 to Present)
Weight: 10 kilograms | Gold value today: about $1.42 million each
Modern mints have quietly made 10-kilogram gold coins a recurring event, always in tiny numbers. China strikes 10-kilo gold Lunar zodiac coins with a face value of 100,000 yuan and a mintage cap of just 18 per year, and struck 29 ten-kilo coins for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Royal Canadian Mint has done it repeatedly, including a one-of-a-kind 2024 piece that sold at auction for over $1.5 million. The Royal Mint produced its first 10-kilo “Masterwork” in 2021, and the Perth Mint strikes 10-kilo Lunar coins to order. None of these sit in a display case at your local dealer. They are commissioned, one collector at a time.
No. 5: Jahangir’s 1,000-Mohur, the Largest Gold Coin Ever Struck by Hand (Mughal India, 1613)
Weight: 11,935.8 grams (26.3 pounds) | Gold value today: about $1.66 million in metal; estimated at $10 million in 1987
Here is the king of the pre-machine age. In 1613, the mint at Agra struck a coin of 1,000 tolas for Emperor Jahangir: nearly 12 kilograms of nearly pure gold, 8 inches across, inscribed in flowing Persian calligraphy. It contains the gold of roughly 1,091 ordinary mohurs, a comparison worked out by the American Numismatic Society’s Michael Bates. Mughal emperors gave coins like this as diplomatic gifts, and this one passed from Emperor Aurangzeb to a noble family that became the Nizams of Hyderabad, who kept it quietly for three centuries.
Then it surfaced in Geneva. On November 9, 1987, the auction house Habsburg, Feldman offered it with expectations around $10 million. India protested that the coin was smuggled national treasure and asked Swiss authorities to seize it. Bidding reached $8 million, short of the reserve, and the lot went unsold. After that, the trail goes cold. The Times of India reported in 2019 that the coin remained untraced, and Indian authorities were still hunting for it as recently as 2022. Somewhere, presumably in a private vault, sits a 26-pound gold coin that would be worth about $1.66 million melted and many multiples of that intact.
No. 4: The Royal Mint Platinum Jubilee Coin (United Kingdom, 2022)
Weight: 15 kilograms | Gold value today: about $2.13 million
The largest coin in the Royal Mint’s roughly 1,100-year history was a privately commissioned 15-kilogram gold piece celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, measuring 220 millimeters across. It took the title from the mint’s own 10-kilo Masterwork struck just one year earlier. When a mint that has operated since Alfred the Great needs two tries in two years to set its size record, you know the giant-coin arms race is alive.
No. 3: The “Big Phil” Vienna Philharmonic (Austria, 2004)
Weight: 31.103 kilograms (1,000 troy ounces) | Gold value today: about $4.43 million
To celebrate 15 years of its Philharmonic bullion coin, the Austrian Mint scaled it up to exactly 1,000 troy ounces of 99.99 percent pure gold, with a face value of 100,000 euros. Just 15 were made, each requiring about 130 hours of work because no coining press could handle a 37-centimeter disc. All 15 sold within weeks. Big Phil was the largest gold coin in the world for exactly three years.
No. 2: The Big Maple Leaf (Canada, 2007)
Weight: 100 kilograms (221 pounds) | Gold value today: about $14.2 million
The Royal Canadian Mint built the Big Maple Leaf to prove it could refine gold to 99.999 percent purity, the highest of any large gold coin. It carries a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars and only five were made.
One of them became the victim of the most famous coin heist in modern history. In the early hours of March 27, 2017, thieves broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum through a window, hauled the 221-pound coin out with a wheelbarrow and a ladder, and vanished. In 2020 a Berlin court convicted two cousins and a museum security guard; a fourth defendant was acquitted. The coin itself was never recovered. Investigators found gold particles on the suspects’ clothes and car and concluded it was broken up and melted. At today’s prices, the gold the thieves destroyed would be worth about $14.2 million.
No. 1: The Australian Kangaroo One Tonne Coin (Australia, 2011)
Weight: 1,012 kilograms (2,231 pounds) | Gold value today: about $144 million
The undisputed heavyweight champion. In 2011 the Perth Mint cast a coin from more than a metric ton of 99.99 percent pure gold: 80 centimeters across, about 12 centimeters thick, with a face value of 1 million Australian dollars and roughly $144 million in gold inside at current prices. Guinness World Records certified it as the largest coin ever made in 2012, and no mint has topped it since. It sits on permanent display at the Perth Mint, slowly rotating, ten times heavier than the runner-up and nearly six times heavier than every other coin on this list combined.
What about ancient Rome’s giant gold pieces?
Rome struck gold multiples of its standard 4.5-gram solidus as imperial gifts, and the largest survivor is spectacular: a 412.47-gram gold piece patterned after a medallion of Emperor Valens, found in the Szilágysomlyó treasure and held in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It misses this list on a technicality, or rather three. Its weight includes an ornate wearable frame, it is a period cast copy of a lost struck original, and numismatists classify these donatives as medallions rather than coins. Money you cannot spend, in other words, even by fourth-century standards.
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