Shandong Twinning Programme

Our school attachment to Li Cheng Er Zhong was very fruitful as the school kindly arranged many activities for us. Chai Chee-ians practically learnt new things everyday; Chinese lessons, Maths lessons, History lessons and also activities like Chinese knots, Chinese Drums, Seal Carving, Pottery, Dancing, Chinese musical instruments and Martial Arts. In this post, I am going to focus on Seal Carving. On the left, you'll see Chai Chee-ians looking at the introduction to seal carving in a powerpoint.

We were each given a set of seal, a carving knife, sand paper, white paper and red inkpad. The teacher then showed us all our surnames on powerpoint written in ancient Chinese.

For e.g. the word would be carved like this on the seal. When we saw our surnames written in ancient Chinese on the powerpoint, we felt very challenged. Nevertheless, Chai Chee-ians took the task very seriously and all of them displayed tremendous resilience in the process of carving their surnames on the seal.

We took about 2 hours or more to carve one surname. It required great focus as any lack of focus would result in the carving knife slipping away, disfiguring the seal. Besides the curly strokes, we also found it difficult to carve on the small area on the seal with the knife. We also had to carve very hard at the seal using great strength to ensure that every stroke was clear and defined, otherwise the print would appear to be blur. One really needed to be very patient too, as each stroke had to be done slowly and carefully. This is Nigel Chua's Chinese surname in ancient character 'Cai'. What do you think of his workmanship?

Actually, in China, especially at Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, there are many roadside stalls which offer seals with your full name at only 8 RMB (about S$1.60). However, many of the Chai Chee-ians saw a place which sells Chinese seals for the first time at the Confucius temple. They made their seals at 30 RMB, only to realise that there are many other stalls 5 minutes away which sell at only 10 RMB. The seal carving masters at the stalls also could carve our full name in three characters in about 3 minutes. (Imagine we took more than 2 hours to carve just one character. And after that, our hands were very exhausted.)