In 1975, residents living at 173 Zhanyuan Road in nanjing wanted to renovate their old house because they felt that their house was in disrepair. At that time, they invited a construction team to renovate the old house, and the workers who had wanted to work on the construction inadvertently found a strange thing on the ceiling of the roof skylight of the house.
The thing looked like a piece of wood, and it was almost buried in the dust. The workers who found the wooden block took it out and gave it to the residents of the house, but the residents did not know what it was, but it looked like some carvings of the pattern of words, so they put it away. Seven years later, when a census of artifacts was launched, the resident took out the wooden block from his family's collection and asked a professional to see what it was, so they invited relevant experts to examine and identify it.
Later, after the appraisal of Mr. Luo Ergang, a famous historian on the mainland, it was determined that this piece of wood was the whole wooden seal of Hong Xiu, the Heavenly King, who had lost his whereabouts for more than a hundred years. According to relevant historical records, the Heavenly King Hong Xiu had a golden seal, a jade seal, and a wooden seal, and the golden seal had been destroyed, and the jade seal of green and white jade was collected in the National Museum of China, but the current original remained missing after the fall of Tianjing in 1864.
The wooden seal is the common seal used by the Heavenly King Hongxiu to approve the signature of the whole day and the approval of printing, and the first page of more than ten books such as the existing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom officially promulgated the "Ritual System" and the "Book of Heavenly Articles" are stamped with the "will" seal of this wooden seal. In further investigation and inference, Mr. Luo Ergang found that the original No. 173 Zhanyuan Road in Nanjing, which was also the hiding place of Mu Xi, was the location of the official office of the late Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
Therefore, he deduced that this square wooden seal was most likely hidden on the ceiling of the roof to avoid it falling into the hands of the Qing army, and thus survived to this day. This three-inch square wooden seal is decorated with dragon patterns on all four sides, and the word "will" is engraved in the middle, and the content of the printed surface pattern is similar to that of the golden seal. After being identified as authentic by the Taiping Historian Mr. Luo Ergang, the wooden seal is now in the collection of the Nanjing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom History Museum.