Seal design - Secret of the Three Kingdoms
For my relationship recaps, I made little seals that indicate which team a character from the Secret of the Three Kingdoms belongs to, and I thought the folks on Tumblr would enjoy nerding out with me a bit on how they came about ...
I did about an evening’s worth of internet research on the Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms, so take everything with a giant bucket of salt. I was looking for some official seals or inscriptions from that era to have a historically accurate basis (and for me to be able to trace something that looked kind of like the seal script).
Unfortunately, the only era-appropriate imperial seal I found specifically says “empress” on it, “皇后之璽”, which wouldn’t quite work with the story. It was buried with the first empress of the Han dynasty. Source 1 online museum, image source Shaanxi History Museum.
What I DID find was that there were quite a few tombs unearthed literally within the last few years, of people related to the Liu and Cao families, and more importantly, there were seals discovered.
This cute little jade tortoise belonged to Liu He, who was an emperor for less than a month in the Eastern Han dynasty. He would have lived several hundred years before the story started, but it’s the same family (I think? The Western Han dynasty seems to be the same last name), and therefore the same character on the seal. It says “大劉記印”, which is basically something about it belonging to the Great Liu family. Image source and info in Chinese 2015, 2016 English article about the excavation.
There were two tombs of note for the Cao family, who eventually kicked off the Three Kingdoms period. One was unearthed in 2010, and it belonged to a general Cao Xiu, who lived at the same time as Cao Cao. He was kind enough to leave behind a bronze personal seal with his name on it “曹休”. (source 1, left image source 2 Xinhua English). There’s some question about whether he was actually related to Cao Cao 曹操, so I kept looking, but the 2nd tomb, directly belonging to Cao Cao and discovered in 2009 / confirmed in 2018 didn’t have anything with his actual name on it that I could find. Eventually I stumbled upon this great Baidu forum post (also right image source) where a history nerd was proving some hypothesis about whether the Cao Xiu seal was related to other Cao family inscriptions by making photo comparisons. I figured it was good enough! I wish I knew where the upper right character came from, but my Chinese isn’t good enough to read it all.
From there, it was just about taking these family name inscriptions, redrawing them into seals with a little artistic license in color and holding shape, for use on the relationship recap charts. And now you know what the teeny orange and green blobs are! Check out all the recaps here.
