As we all know, seals in ancient times are personal credit vouchers, need to be used in some specific environments, and even today from ancient times to today's seals, each one is a valuable and precious cultural relic; but there is a problem worth noting, when stamping must have printing clay as paint, and for a long time, people have not found any physical records about printing mud; so what is the ancient printing clay?
In addition to the way of private use of seals, from the Qin Dynasty onwards, when some envelopes that need to be kept secret were delivered in China, it was stipulated that the county should be sealed with sealed clay on it, similar to the fire paint seal that everyone is very familiar with, which was called sealing mud in the Qin Dynasty; but about these sealing mud, there are few physical objects and documentary records, in fact, the study of sealing mud is as bumpy as the original discovery and study of oracle bones; in the Song Dynasty, which loved to study the golden stone seal, it can be said that everyone can say a few professional terms, and sealing mud, The first discovery and study of printing clay was postponed to the late Qing Dynasty.
According to the "Jinshi of the Qing Dynasty", it is said that the first discovery of the sealed mud was in the second year of the Qing Daoguang, when the farmers in Sichuan were digging yam, they found a cellar with hundreds of seals and seals, as well as a small amount of sealing mud, and some scholars in the Qing Dynasty opened the research path of sealing mud; Qing Dynasty gold stone expert and scholar Wu
Big Wave
In the eighth year of Guangxu, he compiled a book
Yikes
The manuscript of the Sealed Mud Catalogue in the Collection of Zhai contains the names of 80 sealed muds; later Wu Dayi gave this manuscript to the scholar Chen Jieqi, who after studying it, put forward valuable opinions on the authenticity of some of these seals, such as the "Western Communist Seal" was judged by Chen Jieqi to be the Qin Dynasty sealing mud.
With the predecessor's "bridge paving, in 1997, when a large amount of sealing mud was unearthed in the ruins of Dangjia Lane in Xi'an, although some of it was lost by the locals as useless things, professional archaeologists soon touched the "doorway" and protected the sealing mud; archaeologist Wang Xiantang, in the "Linzi Sealing Mud Text", also specially listed the research results on "Qin Sealing Mud"; before the late Qing Dynasty, the study of Qin Sealing Mud can be described as a "virgin land" that has not yet been reclaimed. In fact, it is not that the sealing mud has not been excavated before this, but like the oracle bone, it has not attracted much attention, so after the discovery, it was quickly lost to the people, which has to be said to be a big loss in the archaeological cause of the mainland.
A new discipline, a new research, are due to new discoveries and attention, such as posterity attaches importance to Confucius, there is a later generation of Confucian literature research, the Song Dynasty attaches importance to gold and stone artifacts, there was a gold and stone research at that time, and the prosperity of the market "hot", these cultures are left to posterity priceless treasures; however, for the sealing mud, the ancients have some "discrimination", has been regarded as useless, lazy to study and discarded.
Fortunately, these ancient cultural relics that have been "sleeping" for more than two thousand years finally encountered "Bole" in the late Qing Dynasty; with the development of the times, modern archaeological technology is also changing with each passing day, whether it is folk, or archaeological departments, the types of sealing mud collected are so large that people cannot imagine, and the number of research results on sealing mud is also very amazing; this also reflects from the side that as one of the "treasures" of Chinese national culture, the sealing mud cultural relics have finally received due attention and research.
[References: "Jinshi of the Qing Dynasty Pavilion", "Sealing Clay Examination Strategy"]