A more mysterious document is this document from 강화군 (Ganghwa-gun). It is a certified document, written mainly in hanja. Unfortunately the handwriting is very difficult to read, even Koreans I asked couldn’t make much sense of it. The document comes with one local revenue stamp, issued by Ganghwa-gun itself.
On the stamp is a text which refers to the “cooking pot” shown on the stamp. The text in the stamp (see right lower corner) reads:
사적제136호 = historical location nr. 136
참성단 = name of place, in this case place for offerings to “Dangun”
To see a picture of this particular place go to this Korean language blog (scroll a bit down for the picture).
There are however some strange things about this document. Notice for instance how there is a cancellation on the stamp but not around the stamp! It seems this stamp was cancelled earlier on, perhaps on another document, and re-used on this document. That would explain why 75% of the cancellation is missing. Also, the part of the cancellation which is readable says “4”, but the date in the document does not contain a “4” in hanja!
The other difficulty is: when was this document issued? The year (see bottom left corner) reads as “壹九00”, which would mean 1900. That is very unlikely though. The seller listed this item as issued in 1974, so I will just stick to that year. But who knows? None of the other pages in the document contain any clue to the year.
(Names have for privacy reasons been digitally deleted.)
