Two distinct but historically interconnected categories of imperial seal define the complete record of Chinese imperial seal use across more than two millennia. The first is the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, known in Chinese as Chuán Guó Yù Xǐ (传国玉玺), meaning "Jade Seal Passed Through the Realm," carved in 221 BCE on the orders of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, from a sacred jade disc called the Heshibi. The seal measured approximately four Chinese inches square at the base, with a handle ring carved in the likeness of five interlaced dragons, and bore eight characters in ancient seal script reading "Having received the Mandate of Heaven, may the emperor lead a long and prosperous life" (受命於天，既壽永昌). It passed from dynasty to dynasty for over one thousand years as the physical embodiment of the Mandate of Heaven before disappearing permanently during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907 to 960 CE). Its current whereabouts are unknown. The second category is the Twenty-Five Treasures (Ershiwu Bao, 二十五宝), the set of official imperial seals designated in 1748 by Qing Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736 to 1795) to serve as the state regalia of the Qing dynasty. These twenty-five seals, stored in the Hall of Union (Jiaotai Dian) within the Forbidden City's Inner Court, remain in their original location and constitute the only complete set of an emperor's official seals known to survive anywhere in the world. Qianlong is additionally documented to have commissioned approximately 1,800 personal seals throughout his reign, of which roughly 1,000 survive, with records existing for approximately 30.
Material and Craftsmanship
The Heirloom Seal of the Realm was carved entirely from jade, specifically from the Heshibi, a jade disc with a documented history stretching back to at least the mid-8th century BCE in the State of Chu. Historical records, including Sima Qian's Shiji compiled around 94 BCE, describe the Heshibi as a ceremonial bi disc of extraordinary quality, the largest piece of pure jade its discoverer, Bian He, had ever seen after it was finally polished by royal jewelers under King Wen of Chu. No surviving imprint of the Heirloom Seal is known to exist, making all physical descriptions reliant on textual accounts. According to those accounts, the seal's base measured four Chinese inches square, the upper handle was carved in the form of five interlaced dragons, and one corner carried a gold repair covering a chip sustained in 9 CE when Han Empress Dowager Wang Zhengjun, forced by usurper Wang Mang to surrender the seal, threw it to the ground in protest before handing it over. The text of the eight-character inscription was composed by Chancellor Li Si and physically carved into the jade by the artisan Sun Shou.
The Twenty-Five Treasures are made from multiple materials. The majority are carved jade, with individual seals made from white jade, green jade, and other jade varieties. One seal in the set is wooden, designated the "Wooden Treasure of the Emperor." Most seals feature intertwined dragon knobs carved as handles. One documented example, the Seal of the Great Qing Receiving the Mandate, is made of white jade of exceptional purity with a crouching dragon knob. Its total height is 12 centimeters, with a knob height of 8.2 centimeters. Seal bases are square throughout the set, bearing bilingual inscriptions in both Manchu and seal-script Chinese, reflecting the Manchu ethnic identity of the Qing imperial house alongside its governance of a predominantly Han Chinese population. Each seal was stored in a dedicated damask silk-covered box and recorded in the Register of Treasures of the Hall of Union (Jiaotai Dian Baopu).
Qianlong's personal seals, produced by artisans from the imperial workshops known as the Neiwufu Zaobanchu, were made from a wider range of materials including nephrite jade sourced from Khotan and Kunlun, spinach-green jade, steatite decorated with nine dragons, soapstone, and combinations of white and green jade within matched sets. Workshop archives document that six-seal matched sets were commissioned on specific dates, with three seals carved in white jade and three in green jade. The inscriptions on these personal seals were carved in raised seal-script characters and read from right to left in columns of three. Angular corners in the seal script characters were a hallmark of the Suzhou artisan workshops responsible for the finest Qianlong commissions.
Form and Features
The Heirloom Seal of the Realm, based on textual descriptions confirmed by the History of Liao, was formed as a square block with sides of four Chinese inches, approximately 8.1 centimeters, with a handle ring on the upper surface. The ring was carved in the form of five interlaced dragons, a configuration unique to this seal among all surviving or documented Chinese imperial seals. The base bore the eight inscription characters arranged in an unverified layout, as no authenticated impression of the seal survives. The gold-repaired corner, sustained during the 9 CE incident, is mentioned consistently across independent historical sources and constitutes the most frequently cited physical identifying detail in dynastic records. Chinese historical texts record that the seal was blue-green in color, consistent with the color range associated with high-quality Lantian jade from Shaanxi Province, though this identification is contested by scholars who argue the association with the Heshibi disc makes a nephrite or other jade type equally plausible.
The Twenty-Five Treasures are uniformly square at the base, consistent with the canonical form established for Chinese imperial seals beginning with Qin Shi Huang. Individual seals within the set are distinguished by their jade type, knob configuration, and the specific function recorded for each in the Register of Treasures. The Seal of the Great Qing Receiving the Mandate features a coiled dragon knob and white jade body of documented purity described as possessing "warm moistness." The Seal Reverencing Heaven is made of green jade with a coiled dragon knob. The Seal of the Great Qing's Successor Son of Heaven documents the succession function. Each seal's knob type and jade color was selected in accordance with the seal's designated ritual and administrative purpose, not arbitrarily.
Qianlong's personal seals varied considerably in dimension. A documented Khotan spinach-green jade seal bearing the inscription of the Hall of Diligent Government in the West Garden measures at a scale consistent with his documented personal use seals, with six raised seal-script characters arranged in three columns. A Hall of Three Rarities seal in green jade with a hornless-dragon knob measures 3.3 centimeters long, 1.6 centimeters wide, and 7.5 centimeters tall, with a hornless dragon knob whose eyes, nose, mouth, beard, budding horns, legs, tail, and talons were individually and finely carved. The base of that seal's knob carries a pattern of flowing waves carved in lines that transition continuously into the dragon figure above.
Function and Use
The Heirloom Seal of the Realm functioned as physical proof of the Mandate of Heaven, the foundational doctrine of Chinese imperial governance stating that the right to rule derived from divine sanction contingent on virtuous conduct. Its possession by a ruler was understood not as a symbol of this mandate but as its tangible substance. Dynastic transfer of the seal constituted a formal act of political and cosmological continuity. When the last Qin ruler Ziying handed the seal to the founder of the Han dynasty in 206 BCE, that transfer was recorded as the legitimate passing of the right to govern. When Han Empress Dowager Wang Zhengjun threw the seal rather than surrender it, she simultaneously damaged the physical object and, in the cosmological framework of the period, fractured its integrity as a vessel of divine sanction. Wang Mang's gold repair was an attempt to restore both the object and what it represented. During the Three Kingdoms period (220 to 280 CE), rival warlords including Yuan Shu publicly claimed possession of the seal when advancing bids for imperial legitimacy. Warlord Cao Cao also claimed to have obtained it. These competing claims document that physical possession of the seal, or the credible claim of such possession, carried operative political weight in military and territorial disputes. Dynasties that lacked the seal, including the Ming (1368 to 1644), were aware of this deficit and compensated by producing large numbers of their own imperial seals rather than acknowledging any single object as a supreme regalia.
The Twenty-Five Treasures served distinct administrative and ceremonial functions recorded individually in the Register of Treasures. The Seal of the Great Qing Receiving the Mandate was used specifically for proclamations upon imperial accession. The Seal Reverencing Heaven expressed the emperor's ritual obligation to Heaven. Additional seals were designated for military commands, honors bestowed on vassals, and the promulgation of imperial writings. The seals were under the charge of the Grand Secretariat and required the emperor's explicit approval before removal from the Hall of Union. They could not be used independently. Emperor Qianlong selected the number twenty-five on two deliberate numerological bases: the Eastern Zhou dynasty had lasted 500 years under 25 successive rulers, and twenty-five is the arithmetic sum of the five basic odd yang numbers (1, 3, 5, 7, and 9), making it the highest expression of yang, the masculine cosmic principle. Qianlong selected this number to encode a dynastic aspiration for equivalent longevity and divine masculine power into the count of the seal set itself.
Qianlong's personal seals were used primarily to mark his presence on collected artworks, calligraphy, and written compositions, and to commemorate events including military victories and imperial birthdays. Impressions of these seals were applied directly onto paintings and calligraphic works in his collection, making the seals instruments of connoisseurship as much as administration. The Qianlong Baosou, a catalogue of his seals compiled during his reign and now held at the Palace Museum in Beijing, documents each seal's material, size, script style, and character layout, providing the verification standard against which surviving and newly identified Qianlong seals are authenticated.
Cultural Context
The Mandate of Heaven (Tianming, 天命) was the governing cosmological principle of Chinese imperial rule for over two millennia. First systematized during the Zhou dynasty (1046 to 256 BCE) and codified through subsequent Confucian scholarship, the doctrine held that Heaven conferred the right to govern upon a ruler who was morally virtuous and governed justly. Heaven withdrew that mandate through natural disasters, social disorder, military defeat, and dynastic collapse, authorizing the rise of a replacement. The Heirloom Seal was understood from the Han dynasty onward as the material embodiment of this mandate. A ruler who held the seal held visible, tangible proof of heaven's endorsement. A ruler who lacked it governed under a cloud of unresolved legitimacy. This was not metaphor within the political culture of the period. It was treated as operative reality, affecting military alliances, succession disputes, and diplomatic calculations across centuries.
Jade held a position in Chinese material culture without parallel in any other civilization. Confucius enumerated eleven virtues embodied in jade in the Book of Rites: benevolence, justice, propriety, truth, credibility, music, loyalty, heaven, earth, morality, and intelligence. Han dynasty beliefs held jade capable of preventing bodily decomposition, leading elite families to commission jade burial suits. Some individuals consumed ground jade in liquid form, attempting to absorb its properties into the living body. The selection of jade for the imperial seal was therefore not an aesthetic preference. It was a theological statement about the nature of imperial power and its connection to cosmic order.
The Qing dynasty, as a Manchu ruling house governing a Han Chinese empire, faced persistent questions about the legitimacy of foreign rule. The loss of the original Heirloom Seal before the Qing period existed meant that no dynasty since the Tang had possessed the original object. Qianlong's decision to designate twenty-five seals as the state regalia, documented in a formal register, held in a dedicated hall within the Forbidden City, and encoded with numerological references to dynastic longevity, was a comprehensive institutional response to this absence. It did not claim the original seal had been recovered. It constructed an alternative framework of legitimacy that did not require it. When a jade seal held in the early Qing Forbidden City was examined in 1746 under Qianlong's authorization by a panel of experts, it was found to be a counterfeit, not the original Heirloom Seal. Qianlong accepted and published this finding rather than suppressing it, which itself demonstrated confidence that the Twenty-Five Treasures constituted sufficient and independent grounds of legitimacy without requiring a connection to the Qin-era object.
In the Tang dynasty, Empress Wu Zetian changed the Chinese term for imperial seal from xi (玺) to bao (宝), meaning "treasure." This terminological shift was encoded into institutional practice and persisted through the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The Hall of Union, built during the reign of Ming Emperor Jiajing (1522 to 1566), takes its name from the Book of Changes (I Ching) and means "union of heaven and earth," expressing the Taoist and Confucian concept of cosmic harmony between the celestial and terrestrial orders. The placement of the Twenty-Five Treasures in this hall embedded the seal collection within that cosmological framework at the architectural level.
Discovery and Preservation
No original Heirloom Seal has ever been authenticated. Multiple seals have been presented as candidates throughout Chinese history. A seal found by a 13-year-old boy in Shaanxi Province in 1955 was examined and identified as a personal seal of an emperor rather than the Heirloom Seal. A 2015 report published by ifeng.com claimed the seal had survived into the Republic of China period and sank in a shipwreck in the Bohai Sea in 1948 during the Nationalist government's evacuation of imperial treasures before the Communist advance. This claim is unsupported by documentary evidence. In November 1924, when the last Qing emperor Puyi was expelled from the Forbidden City under the terms of a revised agreement with the Republic of China government, figures including Zhang Bi and Lu Zhonglin conducted a search specifically for the Heirloom Seal before Puyi's departure. It was not found.
The Twenty-Five Treasures have remained in the Hall of Union since their placement there by Qianlong in 1748, with the exception of periods of institutional disruption. When Republican forces expelled Puyi from the Forbidden City on November 5, 1924, an inventory of the palace collection began under the Palace Museum preparation committee. The Palace Museum formally opened to the public on October 10, 1925. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 to 1945), significant portions of the Palace Museum collection, including the most critical artifacts, were evacuated in crates transported first to Shanghai, then to Nanjing, then into the interior of China to protect them from Japanese occupation and potential seizure. After the end of the war, these evacuated objects were returned to Nanjing. Following the Communist victory in 1949, the Nationalist government transported approximately 600,000 objects from the Nanjing collection to Taiwan, where they are now held at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The objects that remained in Beijing, including the Twenty-Five Treasures in the Hall of Union, became the core of the Palace Museum collection in Beijing. The Twenty-Five Treasures are documented as remaining in the Hall of Union in their original damask-covered boxes. One Qianlong personal seal, made of steatite and decorated with nine dragons, was sold at a Paris auction and realized 22 million USD, more than twenty times its pre-sale estimate.
Why It Matters
The Heirloom Seal of the Realm and the Twenty-Five Treasures together document two thousand years of Chinese imperial governance in which material objects carried the weight of cosmological legitimacy rather than purely symbolic meaning. The Heirloom Seal's loss did not reduce its significance. Every dynasty that lacked it was aware of that absence and built institutional responses around it, including the Ming dynasty's proliferation of multiple personal seals and the Qing dynasty's formal designation of the Twenty-Five Treasures as state regalia. The gold-repaired chip on the Heirloom Seal, sustained when an empress threw it in protest against a usurper in 9 CE, is the most frequently referenced physical detail in a millennium of dynastic records, establishing that a damaged object carrying documented history retained greater institutional authority than an undamaged replacement. The Twenty-Five Treasures constitute the only complete set of a Chinese emperor's official state seals surviving anywhere in the world and remain in their original storage location within the Forbidden City, providing an unbroken chain of institutional custody extending from 1748 to the present.