Asian language translation help

December 17, 2006 12:12 PM

My daughter found this small plaque at a garage sale, and wants to know what it says on the back.

Here's a photo of the back of the plaque. I don't even know if it's Chinese or Japanese. The front of the plaque is a domestic scene, showing part of a house and people in and around it. It came in a pretty silk (?) presentation-like box, but I can't find any date (or numbers, for that matter). It feels like it's made from some kind of ceramic material. Any help would be appreciated!

posted by ChromeDome to media & arts (12 comments total)

It's written in formal, traditional, age-old Chinese characters (similar to Olde English typefaces).

It could be "Japanese" but theres's no Japanese characters and a couple of the characters seem to be Chinese-only.

I can't read any of it, alas.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:19 PM on December 17, 2006

(except the last character, 'mon').
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:22 PM on December 17, 2006

It may not be a plaque; it may be an old Chinese ink stone.
posted by xo at 1:19 PM on December 17, 2006

The characters are 黼黻昭文 - (fu3fu2zhao1wen2). The first two characters are names of ancient ceremonial robes worn by scholar-officials (I think); together they were used to allude to literary talent.
My Classical Chinese is really rusty - Google shows the phrase appears in the Qing annals, and going from the context there I'd guess it means something like 'use one's literary talent to illuminate one's writing'.
It seems to be a copy of this ink stone which dates to the Qianlong period (r. 1735-1795). It says there (far too fancy a seal script for me) that the four characters in the seal (the square block at the bottom) are 含英咀华 - (han2ying1ju3hua2). That's still a fairly common four character phrase describing the ability to grasp the essentials and spirit of poetry and literature, or to be able to properly appreciate it.
Oh, and the two characters across the top (read right to left) are 御墨 which means 'the Emperor's/Imperial ink'. I'm no expert on antiquities, but I think this meant either it was for his use or that it was a gift from him.
posted by Abiezer at 2:10 PM on December 17, 2006

Here's a page which allows you to look up a Hanzi character to see what all the old-style versions looked like. (For instance, 女 means woman and here are the old-style versions of it.)

As XO says, the kind of curly-looking versions of the characters were originally for seals.

Just as an odd piece of trivia, if you've ever watched the anime Haibane Renmei and if you have any particular familiarity with hiragana and kanji, you probably wondered what kind of script it was that the Renmei used on the messages they used to leave at Old Home. They were using the old-style characters. For instance, Reki's name written in kanji is 轢 but it didn't look like that. Instead they used the seal character shown here.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:13 PM on December 17, 2006

The characters are written in clerical script/li shu, which was derived from Seal script.
posted by azuresunday at 2:31 PM on December 17, 2006

黼黻昭文 is in clerical script, 御墨,含英咀华 are in seal script. Abiezer did an amazing googling job.
posted by of strange foe at 5:49 PM on December 17, 2006

On reflection, I think the original is actually an ink stick （Ch. 徽墨) rather than a stone.
As I said, I'm not so up on antiques, and I was thrown by how fancy it was, but looking at other examples and given the Imperial associations, I'd say that's what it's a copy of (though perhaps your one is intended for use as an ink stone).
posted by Abiezer at 8:40 PM on December 17, 2006

And that would make the 御墨 = 'Emperor's ink' make a bit more sense too.
posted by Abiezer at 8:42 PM on December 17, 2006

The "emperor's ink" part means it was a gift of the emperor. It's like saying "given by writ of the king"
posted by Pollomacho at 9:19 PM on December 17, 2006

From my coworkers: the original of the plaque was a gift from Quianlong to one of his officers, thus the inscription on the back.
posted by Pollomacho at 9:23 PM on December 17, 2006

As usual, the AskMeFi hive mind totally rocks. Thanks to all for your help!
posted by ChromeDome at 2:49 PM on December 18, 2006