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Chinese Seals in Ireland

Krepostnoi

Krepostnoi

Increasingly disenchanted
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Jul 9, 2012
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My first encounter, as an impressionable* child, with matters Fortean came via the book "Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World". In one of the chapters, there was a discussion of Chinese seals turning up in Irish fields (unlike the recent Merseyside incident, these were porcelain document seals). I seem to remember that the book could offer no reasonable or even unreasonable explanation. Does anyone happen to know if this particular mystery was ever solved?



* I only realised how great an impression it made upon me when I burst into tears on seeing Newgrange for the first time with my own eyes... The surge of emotion came from the fulfilment of a childhood dream, a dream that I had not consciously been aware of beforehand. I was nearly forty.
 
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Krepostnoi said:
My first encounter, as an impressionable* child, with matters Fortean came via the book "Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World". In one of the chapters, there was a discussion of Chinese seals turning up in Irish fields (unlike the recent Merseyside incident, these were porcelain document seals). I seem to remember that the book could offer no reasonable or even unreasonable explanation. Does anyone happen to know if this particular mystery was ever solved?



* I only realised how great an impression it made upon me when I burst into tears on seeing Newgrange for the first time with my own eyes... The surge of emotion came from the fulfilment of a childhood dream, a dream that I had not consciously been aware of beforehand. I was nearly forty.
Click to expand...

You mean this book? I have been emptying our shelves of books and giving away hundreds to charity in the past couple of weeks. I couldn't let this one go though!
 
The very same! There's a definite frisson just seeing the cover again, thank you.
 
for a second I thought this thread was about oriental pinnipeds
 
Possibly unrelated. But several Irish regiments served on campaign during the Anglo-Chinese War in 1856, a walkover British victory resulting in the occupation - and extensive looting - of Peking. The Chinese emperor's palaces were trashed and looted, with shiploads of stuff finding its way back to the British Isles as booty, and forming the origins of several family fortunes. Smaller and larger things from this campaign are everywhere in the isles as so much got swiped. George McDonald Fraser's "Flashman" gleefully recorded that Mrs Flashman took her morning bedside tea every day on an ornate Chinese plaque which Mr Flashman assured her, with a straight face, read "Property of the Empress Of The Heavens" (It actually read "Number One Concubine - do not enter room, she is Busy tending to intimate needs of the Divine Erection") . Apparently McDonald Fraser's great-grandfather brought this back from Peking and it ended up on the bedside table of his straight-laced religious grandmother, who loved owning a thing once belonging, so she thought, to a Chinese Empress. He wrote it into the novel, straight.Something to do with an antique dealer called on to give a valuation who could read Chinese and wasn't sure how to tell a respectable Scottish matriarch and pillar of the Kirk what it really said. )

It's not unreasonable that somebody with the 18th Infantry, the Royal Irish, or the Dublin Fusiliers, might have brought these back from China and a descendent might have thought them worthless, or was spooked with their heathen non-Christian-ness, or something, and threw them away.... could they be traced back to 1856 and liberation from Peking by Irish soldiers? There must be a provenance for the looted Chinese artefacts?
 
Systematic looting of Chinese artefacts by British soldiers also happened in the Opium Wars of 1842. and in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900-01. Wikipedia dryly notes that auctions of captured Chinese goods and valuables were carried out openly in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and that diplomats of other nations and "representatives of Royal Houses" were among those who bid ferociously on desired items. Vast amounts of culturally significant Chinese items thus found their way back to Europe in an art theft which dwarfs the Elgin Marbles by many orders of magnitude and cash value. Still looking for what the Chinese think about this and whether, like the Greeks, they'd quite like the British Museum to fess up and hand it back...
 
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It gets better! The British army commander who authorised the looting of Peking was the Earl of Elgin - son of the man much admired in Greece for his sterling efforts in preserving Greek heritage from going to rack and ruin by chopping it off the front of the building and exporting it to England. It is estimated that 1.5 million Chinese artefacts were looted, much of this making its way back to Britain and Ireland. The Chinese estimate ten million Chinese historical artefacts were destroyed or looted in the three wars between Britain and China. No wonder they didn't extend the lease on Hong Kong... the problem with handing it back, seemingly, is that most of it gets diverted from public museums in China and into the hands of private collectors with the resources to buy bragging rights. And Christies uses the word "acquired" rather than "looted" to describe such artefacts as come to auction sale.... read more here...

http://www.savingantiquities.org/ca...as-summer-palace-continue-to-sell-at-auction/
 
Thanks to emina for posting that article!

The notion that these were looted artefacts does not greatly appeal to me. Things worth the looting would have been valued and not cast aside, surely.

I have only a guess to offer and it may be shot down but could the seals have been connected with sales of tea in a country famously partial to it?

Some interesting history here.
 
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