The very rare large paper edition (indeed much larger than the quarto edition, and the only one with finely coloured plates) of the famous pictorial atlas of the topography, scenery, people, and customs of Japan and adjacent countries under Japanese influence - Korea, in particular - all finely engraved or lithographed and with all the original hand-coloured plates recorded by Landwehr. A smaller, quarto edition was published simultaneously. It has a simpler rendering of the allegorical frontispiece, and is without hand-colouring. The quarto edition is more common, yet still rare. Text volumes (not included) are always in large quarto. Various descriptions, especially at auction houses, give very different numbers of plates. Since nearly all plates are numbered and Von Siebold himself made no distinction between maps and illustrations, determining the exact number of plates should be relatively easy, however, complications exist. Several plate numbers have not been used, some others have been used twice, there are several bis numbers, and some plates have additional letters. Several plates were not issued in the original edition during Von Siebold's lifetime, and several plate numbers have not been used at all. Possibly, a few plates were only issued in a quarto format. The present copy contains plates from the folio edition only. According to some bibliographers, the quarto edition is plain, and this much rarer folio edition is, in part, originally hand-coloured. In all the coloured plates of this copy the colouring is subtle, yet rich in detail, occasionally augmented with gold, often adding additional important details not shown in the plain plates (e.g., in the design of clothes or curtain fabrics), but nowhere is the colouring fancy. All colouring is original. The magnificent hand-coloured plates include those depicting the emperor, the empress, the shogun, various noble men and women, but also soldiers, farmers, and the interiors of various temples. In one quarto copy we have seen a second, rather simple frontispiece of a European monumental needle, the "Schilling-Cannstadt Denkmahl". It is not certain that it was ever intended for the folio edition. Two numbered charts, present in volume III, viz., [a]X, and [a]XI, are not recorded by Landwehr. As often - if not always, this copy does not have all the plates known. In fact, such a copy seems purely hypothetical. Our copy does not have the following plates (all plain), most probably because they were the last ones published, or only published in quarto format. Nippon I: III. map of the Chinese coast and Formosa; V. map " Gedane ontdeckinghe onder den Commandeur Marten Gerritsen Vries. Anno 1643" [not recorded by Landwehr]; VII; double-sized map of the south- and southwest coast of Japan, Kiu Siu and surrounding islands. De vaarwatern... [Not in Landwehr]. Nippon II: d XXVI Zeemans-gids voor de vaarwaters en koersen van Nagasaki naar Ohosaka. These four historical maps on one leaf, copied from other works, were published later with certainty; d XXXIX Panorama van Jedo; i XI to i XV, and k I to V (ten plates dealing with houses, and falconry). read more