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
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