Chinese carved seal, from Grandfather

[jaks53]

I have a carved seal with two vertical rows of chinese chacters upon it. Each row has 7 characters for a total of 14 characters. The stone has a dog carved on top. The seal measures as follows: High 7", Front 2 1/2", Side 1/2", Bottom 1/2" on the bottom of the seal there are eched symbols within the hollow of the symbols you can detect a slight coloring of red, which I assume is old stain from whatever the seal was impressed into. I have attempted to find some information on this object however the subject is rather daunting as these seals have been used for ages in China and have many variations, I have pictures of the seal and would appreciate any help I could get on what the symbols mean and possible dating of the object.

The seal was given to my Grandfather in the 1920"s from a friend of his who was a missonary and had been in China for quite a while. I recently found the seal packed away in a box which had been in my attic since we help my grandparents move in the 1980"s.

I will gladly send any pictures of the seal to anyone who feels they can honestly tell me what it is.

[Lu]

The vertical characters look like they are lines from a poem (I can't really tell what they mean though). The characters on the bottom are usually a name or nickname, and of course mirrored.

[yersi]

Hi, the characters on the side of the seal are taken from a poem called 楓橋夜泊 "A Night-Mooring near Maple Bridge" by the Tang-era poet Zhang Ji. It is included in a very famous collection of poetry called "300 Tang poems".

月落乌啼霜满天，

While I watch the moon go down, a crow caws through the frost;

江枫渔父对愁眠

Under the shadows of maple-trees a fisherman moves with his torch;

姑苏城外寒山寺

And I hear, from beyond Suzhou, from the temple on Cold Mountain,

夜半钟声到客船

Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell.

[Hofmann]

Why are they out of order?

[yersi]

Maybe it's written vertically but from left to right?

Also I experimented a bit with a small seal font today, and I believe the characters on the bottom of the seal are 于示 Yú Shì.

[jaks53]

Thanks for the information and help in identifiing the charcters on the seal and the markings on the bottom. If someone has any other ideas, meanings of the writings, etc. I would like to know. If a larger picture of the characters on the front would help let me know. Again thanks for all of your's help.

[trien27]

Why are they out of order?

Who said they were? It's just that from a missionary's standpoint, languages like English and other languages were better written from from left to right, instead of the Chinese language's original word order from right to left, top to bottom.

The two large characters seem to be a part of something else. Are there any others that you can match it up with?

Edited March 7, 2009 at 11:02 PM by trien27
additional information

[yersi]

Regarding the characters on the bottom of the seal, they are in an older form of Chinese which is called small seal. Small seal characters can be very different from their counterparts in standard script, and if you use a small seal font to type 于示, you will find that they correspond to the ones on the bottom of your seal.

[jaks53]

Thank you Yersi for yet another insightful and knowledgeable explanation to the question of what is written on this seal. Now, does anybody have any idea when this seal may have been made and what it was used for.