Chen Quin Jack

Among the items in my collection are these interesting wooden Chinese chops or stamps. Some of the characters may relate to accounting and others possibly to the renowned Thousand Character Text. There are 40 chops in total in my collection.

Transcribed by Ely Finch, and he believes they may have bene used for accounting purposes:

• Chop 3 contains the stylised words 吉星 “lucky/auspicious star” in a scroll, which was a common motif for stamping and authenticating important entries in account books. 
• Chops 6 to 10 are all words from the 千字文 “Thousand Character Text“, an elegant Children’s primer on all sorts of subjects, which is written in memorable rhyming couplets, and in which no character is repeated. Characters from it were often used for serial numbers in accounting.
• Chops 2, 4 & 5 are labelled “Clause 4”, “Clause 2”, and “Clause 10” respectively. The character for “clause” does, however, have other usages. This is perhaps why it was suggested that the stamps might relate to tea. At this stage, though, in light of the other stamps, I suspect this is not the case.
• Chop 1 also appears to contain a phrase used in accounting, though I haven’t seen it before.

Quin Jack has loomed large in our family narrative but had always been an enigma. His name was anglicized and used in various combinations, either purposefully or recorded as such by officials. He appears as: Chen Quin Jack; Kim Quin Jack; Ah Jack; and C.G Jack. These names made it almost impossible to accurately track his past. Searching for a name written in traditional Chinese is extremely difficult – especially as I can’t read the Chinese characters.

A breakthrough discovery came in identifying Chen Quin Jack. In 2017, when I met the Wong Sisters – Brenda, Cathy and Gaynor, who were able to decode one of the chops. It turned out to be a signature. It was, to my great surprise, Chen Quin Jack’s traditional Chinese name.

陳 – Chen / Chin / Chun / Chan

觀 – Kwun / gwin

植 – Jek / Gik / Chik / tsack / Cak  (meaning –‘ to plant’)

Discovering Quin Jack’s Chinese name made me much more aware of the potential importance of each item in the collection.

“I suspect that it does not reflect the pronunciation of a Cantonese dialect. I don’t think it is Hakka or the Sze Yup language either. It could be one of the three Hokkien-related languages of Zhongshan, e.g. 隆都話 the Loongdoo language”.

— Ely Finch