**** Chinese seal found in Ireland ****

**is that my watch** · Jan 11, 2015, 10:15 AM

Well happen to be glancing through some old bookmarks. I had on my p.c as I was in a tidying up mood haha well to be honest. I had missed a watch sale on the bay as I could not find the bookmark haha and I came across a link I had save a good while back

well going back to the late 1700 hundreds onwards these porcelain seal's start to come to light all over Ireland and it went to say to this day the question had still not been answers to how did they get there ? (this link was from an article circa 2000) so thought why not today let's answer it haha ..... here is the open paragraphs of the article that got me interested

The story of the Chinese seals found in Ireland

In 1850, a paper was read before the Royal Historical Society of Ireland regarding a group
of Chinese porcelain seals that had come to light during the previous eighty years in Ireland.
In total there were about sixty seals which it was claimed had been discovered in various
places throughout Ireland, ranging from Belfast all the way to Cork. In addition to their
wide dispersion pattern, the seals were found in the strangest places – in an orchard, a
cave, bogs, and so on. The discovery could not be easily explained at the time and when
the inscriptions turned out to be written in the Chinese seal script, a number of fanciful
hypotheses were advanced as to how these seals “of great antiquity” appeared in Ireland.
According to these explanations, the seals were either brought over by the Phoenicians, or by
ancient Irish tribes after their wanderings in China, or by mediaeval Irish monks travelling
from the Middle East. All along, the emphasis was on the extent to which these artefacts
corroborated Ireland’s ancient connection with the Orient, an idea that was believed and
promoted at the time by both Irish nationalists and English imperialists. Both sides, albeit
from a different standpoint and driven by different motives, saw the Irish as a distinctly
non-European culture, whose ancestors must have originated from distant lands far beyond
the perimeters of western civilisation.
Voices arguing against the antiquity of the seals were stifled by the rising fame of this
“greatest archaeological mystery of recent years” and their significance in proving long-lost
connections between Ireland and the Orient. Doubts raised by reputable scholars, whose
qualified opinion should have mattered most in this discussion, were ignored and the Chinese
seals of Ireland gradually came to be known as one of the great unexplained mysteries of the
world.
Some of the seals in question are still extant and can be seen at the National Museum
of Ireland. For a modern researcher the seals can be identified as early Qing porcelain seals
from the Dehua kilns in Fujian Province. Accordingly, even though nowadays they would be
considered antique, they are much newer than purported by those in the nineteenth century
who wished to see in them a proof of an ancient link with China. The supposedly ancient
writing on them is in the Chinese seal script which, although at the time identified correctly
as having been in use at the time of Confucius, was still used on seals in the eighteenth
century, as it continues to be used today.

so what's your spin on it faked in the 1850's it true or can't work it out..... love to hear even the mad it was the alien's that left them there comment's

.... but intrigue to see what well thought out notions there might be