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Dear all,
My friend have a couple of Antique Chinese wooden statues with him passed on by his grandparents. Can someone identify the style, period, make of it. It has lot of Chinese characters on it.

The holes are acupuncture points and the writtings specifies what the each acupuncture point cures. Since the writtings are in "simplied chinese" I conclude these statues cannot be more than 50 years old. (simplified chinese were implimented about 50 years ago)

Hi llidabomb ,

Many thanks for fascinating insight. It is certainly helpful.

Regards,
Ash

Which characters do you think are short form? I have been over the photos as carefully as possible and have not found one short form.

Please indicate the characters you mean.

Hi,
I would like to post additional pics if any expert here can analyze it more.
Thanks

The character "Qi" (aka breath) was written in simplified chinese. The characters on the statues were written in mostly a combination of simplified/traditional, but by identifing just 1 simplified character is enough to justify the statue's age.
Bill the "expert" in chinese reading can't even detect a simple character such as "��"? Which makes me wonder if he can read chinese at all? Having a chinese wife that can read chinese does not count...

you are wrong. a number of the characters that were codified by the PRC as "simplified characters" to aid the spread of literacy were in use in China for decades if not centuries before.

"Yi Shu" had been circulated before Han Dynasty. It was the earliest form of simplified Chinese characters that was created under time pressure by the military personnels during battles. Since Han, Yi Shu had not been used until Song Dynasty and after. Simplified Chinese has been in place long before the P.R.C.

It is simply amazing for llidabomb to say that the writings on the statues are in "simplified chinese". I wonder if he/she really knows how to read Chinese at all.

Further more, except one hole right below the right eye does say "eye pain", the other terms are just simply names of the accu points, and not exactly what each accu point will cure.

Actually, these Chinese characters seem to be traditional Chinese to me and they were calligraphed quite well. Both statues seemed to be very pretty old pieces to me, definitely more than 50 years old. Of course this is only my amateur opinions.

Bill

P.S. By the way, Mike, welcome back.

Bill

Given the sheer volume of holes, one wonders if there's anywhere on the body that's NOT an acupuncture point.

O.K., I'll shut up now...

geo:

That actually is a very fair question - how many acucpoint are there? It piques my interest and I
did a search and found the followings:

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_5_3X_Acupuncture.asp?sitearea=ETO&viewmode=print&

"Originally, 365 acupoints were identified, corresponding to the number of days in a year, but gradually, the number of acupoints grew to more than 2,000."

In the summary of this clinical research article:

http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~vitaly/PDF/napadow_ctm_2004.pdf

"Of the more than 150 unique acupoints, the 30 most commonly used points represetned 68% of the toal number of acupoints needled at the first clinic, and 63% of points needled at the second clinic."

Therefore it seems although there are indeed many accupoint on the human body, but the most commonly used one may be less than 150.

Bill

I think that you concluded a little too soon! These are not simplified Chinese characters! These are definitely traditional Chinese characters! This pair of items are definitely more than 50 years old!

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