Korean Map of the World, ca. 1760
GUEST: Well, it was a gift from my brother 30 years ago. I didn't open it, I put it in a drawer, and it's been sitting in a drawer for 30 years, and we just decided to open it up, uh, when my wife's niece came, and she's, uh, from mainland China. She looked at it and said it was Chinese and a map of all sorts of islands and countries. My brother got it when he was in Gwangju, Korea, in the '60s.
APPRAISER: So you have had someone tell you it's Chinese. So we're going to start out and we're going to say, definitively, it's not Chinese. But interestingly, these are Chinese characters.
APPRAISER: But that's because they shared the same characters in...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...China and Korea.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: This is Korean.
APPRAISER: Though...
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: She wasn't wrong, because additional... So here, tian xia tu, in Chinese... "Heaven under map." So this is everything under the heavens.
APPRAISER: And in Korea, it's ch'onhado, which means "everything under the heavens."
GUEST: Oh, yes.
APPRAISER: And you have, uh, Japan, China, and Korea.
APPRAISER: Which...
APPRAISER: Because what else is there?
(laughing) Exactly.
APPRAISER: It was the entire world-- that was it. So now I'm going to leave the world, and we enter into...
APPRAISER: China. With the most identifiable, the Great Wall.
APPRAISER: It's also designed for us to view it this way. So we now go to this one.
APPRAISER: This is where we are getting into Korean provinces.
APPRAISER: This was originally not a scroll. It was a book.
APPRAISER: And it is dated 1760. So these are also important, because they, they are telling boundaries.
APPRAISER: As we keep going, what is the final?
APPRAISER: We have now reached Japan. Here is Japan, listing all of the various islands. It's fantastic.
APPRAISER: It really is. And they, we found a complete version, which is-- they're very, very rare...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:...that is in the Library of Congress.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: You've got a complete version.
APPRAISER: 13 sheets.
APPRAISER: So would you like to know what this might sell for, if you were, put it up at auction?
GUEST: Sure, sure.
GUEST: I don't. (chuckles)
APPRAISER: You don't want to know?
(all laugh)
APPRAISER: Which one gets to know?
GUEST: I do.
APPRAISER: All right. Cover your ears.
APPRAISER: (laughs)
APPRAISER: $8,000 to $12,000.
GUEST: Mm-hmm. Wow. Well, it'll stay in the family, it... My brother and I were really close, and he wanted me to have it. So, I'll have it till I'm no longer, I guess. (chuckles)
APPRAISER: And now we've unraveled the mystery.
GUEST: Thank you.
APPRAISER: We unrolled the mystery.
GUEST: Thank you so much.
GUEST: Yeah.
(all laugh)
$8,000 - $12,000 Auction
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Understanding Our Appraisals
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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