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The making of the first coins featuring King Charles has begun.

The new 50p coin will enter tills, wallets and purses in December and will be used by people across the UK.

Workers at the Royal Mint in Llantrisant, south Wales, will produce 9.6 million copies of the coin which also honours the life of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Royal Mint make all our coins, and update them when there's a new monarch, or every few years to keep them up to date.

Also unlike the late Queen who faced right, King Charles faces left. This is because each King or Queen faces in the opposite direction to the one before.

What does the coin look like?

Charles replaces his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to become the first king on British coins since 1952.

In tribute to the Queen, the reverse of the 50p features the design that originally appeared on coins to commemorate her coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1953.

It includes the four quarters of the Royal Arms depicted within a shield, with emblems of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales - a rose, a thistle, a shamrock and a leek.

Charles does not wear a crown, this follows a tradition that Kings are not pictured crowned.

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The new coins with King Charles' image will be added to these coins with the portrait of the late Queen currently in circulation.

There are around 27 billion coins featuring the late Queen, and people will still be able to use these.

In the past coins featured a number of different monarchs.

In 1971 decimalisation, which was a new currency system, began - this meant all the old coins with images of previous monarchs were replaced with ones featuring the Queen.

Sculptor Martin Jennings, who created the portrait of the King, said that seeing the coin being produced was a "quite remarkable experience".

The artist used pictures of King Charles from his 70th birthday, working for months to get the image right.

"It is a huge honour." Mr Jennings said. "It is extraordinary to think that the smallest piece of work that I have ever done is that one that is going to be reproduced in the most multiples."

How are the coins made?

To make the 9.6 million coins, four presses will be running for 16 hours a day at the Royal Mint's site.

Striking a coin is when an image is pressed into a blank metal disk. Each press can strike 400 coins per minute, making around 20,000 coins an hour.

It takes between 18 months to two years to design a coin, with the monarch personally signing off each one.

Before her death, the Queen signed off a number of coins - including a Harry Potter commemorative series - and production of these will continue.

Two of the Harry Potter series will feature the late Queen, with the other two bearing the portrait of the King.