...life can be translucent

Menu

Old Book Resources

hilary

Administrator
Joined
Apr 8, 1970
Messages
19,149
Reaction score
3,418
Thanks, tacrab. These are rewarding to browse even for those of us who can't read the Chinese - we can still appreciate the pictures!
 

hilary

Administrator
Joined
Apr 8, 1970
Messages
19,149
Reaction score
3,418
Exactly! This gives you a vivid sense of what it's like to wear one, doesn't it? Being very strangely cut off from the rest of your own body. I'd always imagined them with hand-holes, like the stocks, but maybe that's a European version.
 

remod

visitor
Joined
Oct 24, 2008
Messages
226
Reaction score
89
Here's a great bunch of old Chinese books available digitized,
Thanks tacrab!

Among the many interesting things there, I've found a very fine book of images: https://www.wdl.org/en/item/301/ and, in that book, a set of symbols I had never seen.

Does anybody know if they represent or refer to something? Or are they just graphic elements?

1629813642900.png
 

remod

visitor
Joined
Oct 24, 2008
Messages
226
Reaction score
89
In the same book there is also this interesting image (page 121):

1629814479744.png

Where the trigrams are in the King Wen order (oriented with the lowest line outwards).
It would have been wonderful to know what the text says ...
 
Last edited:

dfreed

Inactive
Joined
Feb 6, 2021
Messages
1,045
Reaction score
409
Where the trigrams are in the King Wen order (oriented with the lowest line outwards).
I don't know what it says.

You may already know this, but this is the Houtian, or King Wen, or Later Heaven Bagua (trigram) circle. There is another thread here - Harmen on trigram circles - where Harmen Mesker talks about the age and origin of this circular arrangement, but not really what it means.
 

tacrab

visitor
Joined
Nov 19, 2015
Messages
167
Reaction score
81
This book is the Fang Family Book of Ink-cake 方氏墨譜。 16th century.
Perhaps could call it a pattern book. These are designs that would be embossed onto ink cake in mold.
 

Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom

Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).

Top