Quick Answer: What Were Chinese Imperial Seals?
Chinese imperial seals identified and exercised royal authority. An impression might secure a document, validate a grant or record an emperor’s relationship to a work of art.
- Early seals: could mark clay pressed over the knot of a bound document.
- State seals: could authorize specific categories of official writing, such as grants of rank.
- Collection seals: could record that a ruler had viewed or collected an earlier painting.
- Materials: included jade, gilded silver and sandalwood in the Qing state set.
The seal’s inscription, the object receiving its impression and the record of use each answer a different question.
A seal impression on a Qing grant of hereditary privilege served a different purpose from one on an old handscroll. The grant records an act of government. The mark on the scroll might record an emperor’s viewing centuries after the artist put down the brush. Across Chinese history, a seal’s wording and the surface carrying its impression have offered clues to the purpose of the mark.
From Sealing a Document to Stamping It
In the age of wooden writing slips, a cover could be tied over the writing and a lump of damp clay pressed over the knot. Stamping that lump left a clay sealing, or fengni (封泥, fēngní). To open the bundle, a reader generally had to disturb the closure. The mark could identify the authority behind a document while the clay made interference visible. This system was familiar in the Qin and Han periods. [1][2]
As paper became the main writing surface, the impression could go onto the document itself. On paper, its position relative to text, joins or later additions helps explain what the mark was doing. A detached clay sealing can still carry useful information about an office or title after its original document has disappeared. [1][2]
What an Imperial Seal Can Tell You
A common distinction in accounts of the early empire is between xi (玺, xǐ), reserved for imperial seals, and yin (印, yìn), a broader word for seals that also appears on official and private examples. Earlier usage varied, and official inscriptions changed over time. Seal script, or zhuanshu (篆书, zhuànshū), can preserve a title in forms that are hard to recognize from ordinary modern print. [1]
The Shaanxi History Museum’s Western Han jade seal illustrates the difference between reading a title and assigning an owner. It is 2.8 centimeters on a side and identifies itself as an empress’s seal. It was found at Xianyang in 1968 near the Changling mausoleum complex. The museum proposes Empress Lü as a possible owner. The inscription identifies a position, while the findspot helps support the more tentative personal attribution. [3]
Material gives another clue. Qing state seals include jade, gilded silver and sandalwood. Knobs on some pieces form paired or coiling dragons. The knob, face and inscription each add evidence, and a fine carving by itself establishes little about the specific work an object performed. [4]
How Qianlong Assigned the Twenty-Five Seals
In 1746 the Qianlong Emperor reviewed earlier state seals, selected twenty-five and assigned them specific uses. The set assigned distinct tasks to different seals. The Seal of the Great Qing Receiving the Mandate expressed the dynasty’s right to rule. The Seal for Proclamations turned up in the routine administration of honors and hereditary rank. Both belonged to the same official set. [4][5][9]
The jade Seal for Proclamations, or Zhigao zhi Bao (制诰之宝, Zhìgào zhī Bǎo), has a square face 13 centimeters across. The Palace Museum records that it appeared often on formal grants. In one procedure, the responsible office submitted a record of merit, the Grand Secretariat had the grant written out, and the document went for sealing before it was issued. The resulting impression helps identify a step in the work of the imperial court and its scholar-officials. [5]
The seals were housed in the Hall of Union, or Jiaotai Dian (交泰殿, Jiāotài Diàn), in the Forbidden City. The court recut twenty-one of them in 1748 so their Manchu inscriptions would use a seal-script style alongside Chinese seal script. Four earlier examples were excepted. One was the Seal of the Great Qing Receiving the Mandate, a white-jade piece that the Palace Museum traces back to the reign of Hong Taiji. Its older Manchu lettering survives alongside seal-script Chinese. That contrast preserves a different stage of seal design within the same Qing collection. [4][6][9]
Why a Painting Might Carry an Emperor’s Seal
The Smithsonian’s documentation for A Breath of Spring, a handscroll by Zou Fulei, records a Qianlong poem and nine imperial collector seals associated with Qianlong and Jiaqing. The two rulers viewed the work long after its creation. Their impressions document a later chapter in the scroll’s life, alongside the poem and the imperial catalogue entry. [7]
When reading a handscroll, look for whose name or title the seal carries, where it lies in relation to the painted image or an added text, and whether the object record dates that addition. Those clues can distinguish an artist’s own mark from the Qing court’s later marks. An impression on a later mounting can belong to a different period from the painted surface. [7]
The Heirloom Seal and the Problem of Proof
Tradition connected an heirloom seal, or chuanguo xi (传国玺, chuánguó xǐ), to Qin Shi Huang. Stories of its transfer tied the object to the Mandate of Heaven. Unlike the white-jade Qing mandate seal, this heirloom story makes a claim about the passage of one object through several regimes. Linking a surviving seal to that story requires evidence about its earlier owners. [8][9][10]
In 1738, workers clearing a waterway in Jiangsu found a seal bearing the expected inscription. It reached Qianlong, who judged the material to be something other than jade and rejected the identification. He kept it as an antiquity. The Palace Museum still holds the object, catalogued as purple clay. Its inscription can be compared with older descriptions. Its recorded journey begins with the 1738 discovery. Those are separate clues, and their limits are a useful starting point for reading Chinese history alongside legend. [8]
FAQs About Chinese Imperial Seals
Were all Chinese imperial seals made of jade?
Jade appears in many imperial objects, including a Western Han empress’s seal and several Qing state seals. Qianlong’s official set also includes gilded silver and sandalwood.
Did the emperor personally stamp every document?
An impression shows that a document went through a sealing procedure. For Qing formal grants, offices and the Grand Secretariat could prepare the text and send it for sealing before issue.
Does an imperial seal identify a painting’s artist?
It can identify a later viewer, collector or owner. To tell when the mark was added, compare its wording and position with other inscriptions and the painting’s catalogue history.
Sumber
[1] The Palace Museum. Seals and impressions collection
[2] The Palace Museum. Clay sealings
[3] Shaanxi History Museum. The Empress Jade Seal
[4] The Palace Museum. Twenty-Five Imperial Seals
[5] Guo Fuxiang, The Palace Museum. Jade Seal for Proclamations
[6] The Palace Museum. Hall of Union
[7] Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. Object documentation for A Breath of Spring
[8] The Palace Museum. Purple clay heirloom seal
[9] The Palace Museum. A Seal that Claims the Mandate of Heaven
[10] China Online Museum. Chinese seals and the heirloom tradition