The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This paper investigates the optimal currency composition for a country's foreign reserves. In the context of China, we examine the asymmetry fat-tails and complex dependence structure in distributions of currency returns. A skewed, fat-tailed, and pair-copula construction is then built to capture features of higher moments. In a D-vine copula approach, we show that under the disappointment aversion effect, the central bank in our model can achieve sizeable gains in expected economic value from switching from the mean-variance to copula modelling. We find that this approach will lead to an optimal currency composition that allows China to have more space for international currency diversification while maintaining the leading position of the US dollar in the currency shares of China's reserves._________________________________