This piggy bank was found in the drawer of the desk. Yang Jing opened the drawer to see if there was anything left inside. He found that in addition to some handwritten documents, there was also a palm-sized piggy bank at the deepest part of the drawer.
The piggy bank is made of porcelain, and the style is also the very simple Chinese Fuwa shape. Although there are many piggy banks of this shape in China, they are rare in the United States across the Pacific Ocean, especially in the United States more than a hundred years ago. Obviously, this piggy bank should have been bought by Alfred a long time ago, and it was even a gift Alfred received at Christmas when he was a child.
Anyway, this piggy bank must have had a certain status in Alfred's adolescence, otherwise such a piggy bank would not appear in the drawer of the desk.
Picking up the piggy bank and shaking it, Yang Jing found that there were still quite a few coins in it.
This old-fashioned piggy bank is like a "Pixiu". You can only take coins in but not take them out. If you want to take the coins out of the piggy bank, there is no other way except to break the piggy bank.
However, although this piggy bank has a history of at least a hundred years, it is not a precious porcelain. Moreover, this piggy bank may be a very important thing to Alfred who has passed away for a long time. But for Yang Jing, there is no psychological burden in breaking this piggy bank.
So Yang Jing used a small hammer to smash the piggy bank, and surprisingly, there were really good things inside.
There are about fifty coins of different sizes in this piggy bank, mostly silver coins, but also some gold and copper coins.
In the early days of the United States, the coins with larger denominations were mostly gold and silver coins, while the coins with lower denominations were mostly copper coins. Unlike modern coins, which are mostly made of alloys.
If this piggy bank really belonged to Alfred, then it would not be surprising to see gold and silver coins in the piggy bank during his time.
Now the gold and silver coins issued by the United States in the early days have very high collection value, so although the number of these gold and silver coins is small, their value is actually not low.
After carefully distinguishing these gold and silver coins, Yang Jing actually found two somewhat unusual gold coins among them.
Both coins were high-denomination coins—twenty dollars—and featured an image of Lady Liberty holding a torch and an olive branch on the obverse and an eagle in flight on the north side.
The face value of twenty dollars, plus the two images, immediately made Yang Jing realize that he seemed to have picked up a big bargain inadvertently!
If the magazines, books and even teak furniture found earlier were considered a small bargain, then the sudden appearance of these two shining gold coins was definitely a huge bargain!
This big leak was so big that he didn't even have to spend any money to buy this manor, and there was still a lot of surplus!
The reason is simple, because these two gold coins are actually the legendary "Double Eagle Coins".
During the era when the United States implemented the gold standard, it once issued a gold coin with a face value of ten dollars. The obverse of the coin was a statue of the Statue of Liberty holding a torch and an olive branch, while the reverse was a flying eagle. This ten-dollar gold coin was called the "Eagle Coin" by Americans.
In 1933, the United States issued a coin with a face value of twenty dollars. Because the pattern of the coin was the same as that of the Eagle Coin, but the face value was doubled, in order to distinguish it, this Eagle Coin was called the "Double Eagle Coin" by Americans.
This "double eagle" was minted in 1933, and a total of 500,000 pieces were minted at the time. It was not rare. But soon after it was minted, Roosevelt implemented the New Deal and ordered the abolition of the gold standard, and therefore the use of gold coins had to be stopped. As a result, more than 445,000 of this batch of "double eagles" that had just been minted were eventually melted down into gold bars in 1937, and the molds for minting gold coins were also destroyed.
Therefore, this batch of 1933 edition "Double Eagle" coins became the last batch of gold coins in the United States. Only very few "Double Eagle" coins survived among the people, so they are extremely precious and are known as the "Mona Lisa among coins."
This gold coin is extremely precious. In 2002, a "Double Eagle Coin" was sold at a sky-high price of US$7.59 million, setting a record for the highest auction price for a single currency. It is also the most valuable coin in the coin collection world today, and tops the list of coin collections in the world.
Scarcity makes things valuable. This old Chinese saying is also fully reflected in the Double Eagle coin.
Because these gold coins were recovered by Roosevelt through administrative means, strictly speaking, these gold coins are uncirculated currency. It is said that Roosevelt even dispatched agents and national security departments to recover some double eagle coins that were already in circulation. Moreover, the United States publicly announced at the time that these gold coins should not remain in the world, and even if they remain in the world, they belong to the property of the US government.
In later generations, only a dozen double eagle coins that were not destroyed that year remained, and only one gold coin was collected by a private collector. The reason why this collector was able to publicly collect this double eagle coin was that it was preserved because of historical issues. The other surviving double eagle coins were either not publicly publicized by collectors or had long been recovered by the US government.
The reason why the U.S. government has such a tough attitude towards these dozen gold coins is mainly because the U.S. Gold Reserve Act at that time prohibited private ownership of uncirculated gold currency. Although this law was repealed in 1974, the double eagle coin appeared before the repeal of this law. Therefore, if a private person holds this kind of gold currency, it is illegal. The double eagle coin itself is a currency that has never been truly listed and circulated, so if a private person holds it, it is illegal.
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