Loss
The Seal was passed through the Wei Dynasty, Jin Dynasty, Sixteen Kingdoms period, Sui Dynasty and Tang Dynasty, but was lost to history in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-960).
Three theories exist as to how it was lost:
- At the end of the Later Tang Dynasty, when the last Emperor died by self-immolation.
- In AD 946 when the Emperor Taizong of Liao captured the last Emperor of the Jin state.
- The Seal came into the hands of the Yuan emperors. When the Ming armies captured the Yuan capital in 1369, it captured just one out of the eleven personal Seals of the Yuan emperors. The Heirloom Seal was not found. In 1370, Ming armies invaded Mongolia and captured some treasures brought there by the retreating Yuan emperor. However, the Heirloom Seal was again not among these.
In any case, the Seal was known to be lost by the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. Both the Ming and the Qing dynasties did not have the Heirloom Seal. This partly explains the Qing Emperors' obsession with creating numerous imperial seals - for the Emperors' official use alone the Forbidden City in Beijing has a collection of 25 seals - in order to reduce the significance of the Heirloom Seal.
Read more about this topic: Imperial Seal Of China
Famous quotes containing the word loss:
“Every farewell combines loss and new freedom.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, an almost somatic conviction that there is a meaning to what they are doing. Ultimately, children become neurotic not from frustrations, but from the lack or loss of societal meaning in these frustrations.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)