Asian Art Gallery Forum

[hein]

A friend has this simple inktbox (?) with a text (poem?) on it.

It would be nice to have a translation in Pinyin and English. How should it be read, from left to right, from down to up?

My guess is that it is written in caoshu (based on what I found on different Chinese scripts. I.e. from before 1949. Would it be possible to date it further?

[Gary]

This is not really our specialty. No one here is a certified appraiser or anything.

We can translate that (with pinyin) for a small fee:
http://www.orientaloutpost.com/proddetail.php?prod=x-eval

If we don't charge a fee, we get overrun with request for this kind of service (which often takes up to an hour of work). Then none of the for-profit work would get done, and we'd be out of business.

Not being a certified appraiser, and not having the item in my hands to personally inspect it, I cannot guess an age for this. There are far too many fakes (the fakes are often better-made than the real ones). There are whole open-air markets all around China where 90% of the items sold are fakes. I am only really good at spotting watercolor paintings and wall scrolls of questionable pedigree.

Cheers,
-Gary.

[hein]

Apologies, apparent misunderstading. I submitted this, as I saw on the forum that some translation had been done.
As for assumed appraisal, that is not the intention. Whether it is fake or not does not matter. We are just curious about the text. Again, sorry for bothering.

[Gary]

No worries.

Sometimes a customer posts a picture of their tattoo, and we give them the bad news (it's usually bad news) for free.

Yours has a lot of characters and all zhuanshu (ancient seal script), so it would take a lot longer. Even our native translators would have to look up a quarter of those characters in a zhuanshu dictionary one-by-one.

Thus the small fee of $10 for that work.

I really wish I didn't have to charge for that. There was a day, a couple years ago (before I launched this forum), when I received about 13 request like this via email. I started working on all of the queries, and before I knew it, I had spent over 8 hours on them. I had not packed and shipped a single order, and the post office was closing. The next day I sent the previous day's orders by Express Mail (cost $200+ extra).

That's when I realized that I could no longer do so many free jobs.

To keep things in balance, I offer a free online Japanese / Chinese / Buddhist dictionary:
http://www.orientaloutpost.com/dictionary.php
And various tools:
http://www.orientaloutpost.com/tools
Oh, and a lot of people use our calligraphy dictionary/database for their personal use/info:
http://www.orientaloutpost.com/shufa.php
Over 300,000 unique visitors use these resources annually on our website (basically 5000+ per day).

Cheers,
-Gary.