Chinese seals in Ireland: The phenomenon of the “ancient” Chinese porcelain seals found in Ireland
Dr David Bell (Queen’s University Belfast)
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, small white porcelain seals of a type long used by Chinese scribes and academics were discovered across Ireland in bogs, riverbeds and caves. More than 60 of these curious and “very ancient” artefacts entered antiquarian collections, and a paper read before the Royal Historical Society of Ireland in 1850 considered the various means by which such venerable antiquities could have arrived on these shores while remaining completely unknown elsewhere in Europe. These ranged from Phoenician traders to ancient wandering Irish tribes to returning medieval Irish missionaries.Such exotic finds were even held to underpin Ireland’s uniquely oriental origins.
Several were exhibited in Belfast in September 1852, ‘On the Occasion of the Twenty-Second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’ and at the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin between May and October of 1853. They also appeared as a discrete category in William Wilde’s 1857 catalogue of the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. In January 1868, however, in a paper read before the Royal Irish Academy, a more recent date was attributed to the seals and it would eventually became clear that they were little more than ballast from the British East India Company’s tea clippers.