[memento]

I have an antique chinese "credenza" and there is a label on the back with some writing. I'm told it's from China, but don't know any better. Can someone help me to read it? Here are links to 2 pictures I took of it. You can download high res images, also.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/memento/82282801/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/memento/82282420/

thanks!

[Oisín]

Well... that does look like Chinese, but it’s completely impossible to make any of it out properly.

I think I see all three of the “lines” on the left (the ones written in thick brushes) ending in 工. The third one looks like it might be 漆工, which means “painter, lacquerer”.

Judging by that, it seems to be simply a list of who did what on the credenza. The first of the three could perhaps be 木工 (woodwork)—I have absolutely no idea what the middle one could be: the first character is so mushed out, I can’t even venture a guess at its radical.

The three lines on the right are the names of the people who did the various things, obviously. The woodworker seems perhaps to be named 永 (Yong) something—the second character looks a bit like 环, 坏, or 怀, but those would all be rather odd characters to have in a name, especially on their own. The guy in the middle, whatever he did on the credenza, could possibly be called 王惠民 (Wang Huimin), which Google does seem to agree is a not uncommon name (惠民 means to do something that’s good for people, so lots of people probably named their sons that in the true Mao spirit back in the 50s and 60s). The last guy’s name looks most like either 王年生 (Wang Niansheng) or 王华生 (Wang Huasheng), not sure which. Both appear in Google.

[Oisín]

Also, I don’t think it’s all that antique... the names on the right seem to have been written with a ballpoint pen. They could have been added later on, of course, but what would be the point of that?

(Writing this as a second post rather than editing the first one in order to avoid typing in all those Unicode values for characters again)

[memento]

Thanks a bunch! The photos were adjusted to make it more readable, but it doesn't look like a ballpoint pen in person. But more importantly, it seems as though the writing is simply a list of the people who worked on it and nothing that's more relevant to a date or location.

[Oisín]

I forgot to mention before: it looks like there used to be four characters more at the very top. These are all so washed out I can’t even venture a guess as to what they might once have been. The third one looks like it might once have been 家 (house, family, corporation, firm, household, etc.). I could guess that the last two characters together are then 家具 (furniture—the last character could be a 具), and that the four top characters are then the name of the company that made the credenza—but that would be pure guessing and not necessarily true.

There doesn’t seem to be anything more than that suggesting a date or location, though, that’s true. All the characters written there are the same in their simplified and unsimplified forms, so not much help there, either. The only exception is the second character in the first name, the 环/坏/怀 one, they all look much different in their full forms (環, 壞, and 懷, respectively), so that would indicate that it was made after 1956 when the characters were simplified in Mainland China. Then again, all three characters had been in frequent use in their simpler forms in ‘colloquial’ handwriting long before that, both in Mainland China and other places (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore), so that’s not much to go by, either.