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The story of the Chinese seals found in Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2008
Extract
In 1850, a paper was read before the Royal Historical Society of Ireland regarding a group of Chinese porcelain seals that had come to light during the previous eighty years in Ireland. In total there were about sixty seals which it was claimed had been discovered in various places throughout Ireland, ranging from Belfast all the way to Cork. In addition to their wide dispersion pattern, the seals were found in the strangest places – in an orchard, a cave, bogs, and so on. The discovery could not be easily explained at the time and when the inscriptions turned out to be written in the Chinese seal script, a number of fanciful hypotheses were advanced as to how these seals “of great antiquity” appeared in Ireland. According to these explanations, the seals were either brought over by the Phoenicians, or by ancient Irish tribes after their wanderings in China, or by mediaeval Irish monks travelling from the Middle East. All along, the emphasis was on the extent to which these artefacts corroborated Ireland's ancient connection with the Orient, an idea that was believed and promoted at the time by both Irish nationalists and English imperialists. Both sides, albeit from a different standpoint and driven by different motives, saw the Irish as a distinctly non-European culture, whose ancestors must have originated from distant lands far beyond the perimeters of western civilisation.
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References
1 Anthologia Hibernica (April 1793), p. 284.
2 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 5 (1841), pp. 381–382.
3 Rémusat, Jean Pierre Abel, Élemens de la Grammaire Chinoise (Paris, 1822)Google Scholar.
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7 Davis, The Chinese, p. 289.
8 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 5 (1841), p. 382.
9 Getty, Edmund, Notices of Chinese Seals Found in Ireland (Dublin, 1851)Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., p. 9.
11 Ibid.
12 For an updated translation of the seal inscriptions, see the Appendix to this paper.
13 Scientific American (May 1, 1852), p. 261. 150 years later, the magazine ran the first half of this story in a commemorative issue without commenting on it or adding new information (May 2002, p. 11). The news of the Sino-Irish seals appeared in the paper for the first time in 1851, as a short report on Getty's book (1 March 1851).
14 The Gentleman's Magazine (August 1852), p. 182.
15 Sproule, John, ed., The Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853: A Detailed Catalogue of its Contents (Dublin & London, 1854), p. 478Google Scholar.
16 ‘Mr. Croker's Library and Museum’, The Times (Friday 29 December 1854), p. 4.
17 Wilde, W. R., A Descriptive catalogue of the antiquities of stone, earthern, and vegetable materials in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, 1857), pp. 195–196Google Scholar.
18 As an interesting bit of antiquarian research, I came across a reference to yet another seal on the inside cover of Getty's book at the British Library. A handwritten note said, ‘Several seals not mentioned here were found on the estate of Mr. Evelyn P. Shirley, Lough-Fea Carrickmacross, county of Monagham. C.S.H’. There was also a ‘collection of Chinese seals in porcelain and soap-stone, found in Ireland’ presented to the British Museum in 1922 by W. H. Murphy-Grimshaw, Esq., although these were most likely originally included in Getty's list (The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 40, No. 231., June 1921, p. 312). In this record, the claim that the soap-stone seals were also found in Ireland was obviously a mistake.
19 Notices of Chinese seals found in Ireland, p. 14.
20 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. X (1870), p. 174.
21 Ibid., p. 176. The same letter is also included in Helen Legge's biography of her father as an example of his willingness to help those who turned to him with questions: Helen Edith Legge, James Legge, Missionary and Scholar (London, 1905), p. 167.
22 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. X (1870), p. 176.
23 ‘Correspondence &c.’, The Phoenix: A monthly magazine for India, Burma, Siam, China, Japan & Eastern Asia, No. 20 (February 1872), p. 132.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., No. 19 (January 1872), p. 116.
26 Ibid., No. 21 (March 1872), p. 152.
27 One such documented instance was seal No. 9 in Getty's list (see Appendix of this paper) which once belonged to Mr. T. Allen of Lambeth and was “brought from China by a person who gave it to his wife's mother when a girl”. To this, Samuel Birch of the British Museum remarked that “this may perhaps help to fix the age of the seals, which are inscribed with a character by no means so ancient as some have conjectured” (The Gentleman's Magazine, May 1853, p. 527). It seems that this information was not available for Getty when he was compiling his report.
28 Mollet, John William, An Illustrated Dictionary of Words Used in Art and Archaeology (London, 1883), p. 292Google Scholar.
29 The Washington Post, for example, published a short article in 1924 under the title of ‘The Mystery of the Chinese Seals’ in which it hypothesised that the seals had come to Ireland with the Scythians (Washington Post, 18 August 1924, p. 6.). Beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon world, Nicolas Roerich, the celebrated Russian painter and mystic, used the case of the ‘ancient’ Chinese seals from Ireland as the basis of a lengthy discussion on how seals connected people and distant cultures (Rerikh, Nikolai, Nerushimoie, Riga, 1936Google Scholar).
30 Welfare, Simon and Fairley, John, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (London, 1980)Google Scholar.
31 Smith, George and Thackeray, William Makepeace, ‘The Chino-Irish seals: A Minor Mistery’, The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. I (January to June 1860), p. 195Google Scholar.
32 On Ireland's connection with the Orient from mediaeval times through to the nineteenth century, see Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A literary and intellectual History (Syracuse, 2004).
33 Leerssen, Joseph Th., Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the idea of Irish nationality, its development and literary expression prior to the nineteenth century (Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 1986), p. 420CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the role of Vallancey's ideas of the connection between Ireland and the Orient, as well as his influences on Orientalism, see Joseph Lennon, ‘Antiquarianism and Abduction: Charles Vallancey as Harbinger of Indo-European Linguisics’, The European Legacy Vol. 10, No. 1 (2005), pp. 5–20.
34 Donelly shows a seal inscription in his book on blanc de chine which also occurs on seals from Getty's list. Unfortunately, Donelly misreads the seal, which says jin feng 謹封 ‘carefully sealed’, as wan pang (wan bang in pinyin) ‘ten thousand countries’ (Donnelly, J. P., Blanc de Chine: The Porcelain of Têhua in Fukien, London, 1969, p. 107Google Scholar). Donnelly also mentions the mystery of the ‘discovery of a blanc de Chine lion seal in an apparently undisturbed bog in Ireland’ (Ibid., p. 187). Rose Kerr's recent book shows a number of Dehua porcelain seals from the Hickley collection in Singapore, of which a miniature one with a monkey on it, catalogued as No. 63, is very similar to the ones found in Ireland. Not surprisingly, this particular piece did not come from a Chinese collection but was acquired in London in 1972 (Kerr, Rose and Ayers, John, Blanc de Chine: Porcelain from Dehua [Richmond, 2002], p. 104Google Scholar).
35 I would like to express my gratitude here for the insights provided by Lai Guolong from the University of Florida.
36 This is a quote from the Book of Odes (Mao 129): ‘The man of whom I think, Is somewhere about the water’. (Translation by James Legge).
37 Comes from Wang Bo's 王勃 (649–676) ‘Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng’ 滕王閣序.
38 This is yet another line from the same verse in the Book of Odes (Mao 129) as in the case of seal No. 11: ‘The man of whom I think, Is on the margin of the water’ (Legge).
39 The same quote from the Book of Odes (Mao 129) as on seal No. 11.
40 A quote from the Analects of Confucius (9:30 ‘Zihan’): ‘“How the flowers of the aspen-plum flutter and turn! Do I not think of you? But your house is distant”. The Master said, “It is the want of thought about it. How is it distant?”’ (Legge).
41 The same quote from the Book of Odes as on seals No. 11 and 21.