Ink Paste for Seals

The ink paste used for the imprinting of seals is call yinni in Chinese , which means literally “seal clay”. It stems from the clay that was used in ancient times to seal official documents and which, like the modern sealing wax, was stamped by a seal.

Later on the word yinni began to refer to the traditional equivalent of the inking pad – the paste, usually red – which gives the seal its colour before it is stamped on paper.

High-quality inking paste is made of eight ingredients, some very precious: cinnabar, pearl, mush, coral, ruby, moxa, castor oil and a red pigment.

Called the “paste of eight treasues:, it produces brilliantly red prints. Paste of a still higher grade may contain pure gold and other rare materials and is so finely made that it may remain unchanged in hundreds of years. It also emits a faint perfume, and its oil neither oozes in summer nor congeals in winter. Ink paste of this description is greatly valued by painters and collectors.

To make a seal imprint, let the cut face of the seal touch lightly the inking pad several times, take a look and see that it is evenly coloured, place the paper to be stamped on a desk, cushioned beneath with some other paper, and then use the seal lightly on it, holding it for a little while and increasing the pressure of the hand toward the end. An impression made this way, whether of characters or patterns, will be clear, well-defined and nice-looking.