[Music] here we have in three seals the entire history the rise and fall of two dynasties right there basically in right then the palm of your hand the first seal that we've got here on the right um is a seal that was carved for a ming emperors the wife of emperor jungler and it was carved by her son by orders of her son the honxi emperor who reigned for a very short period of time less than a year in 1425 so we can date this year exactly to 1425 and it's a seal that was carved to remember her and would have been placed in the tanya in the forbidden city which was the ancestral hall of the ming emperors this is very possibly the only the single one surviving seal of the ming dynasty except for the ones that were buried with the emperors so here you'll see on the other side of the seal it is destroyed right so it was carved um at the very pinnacle of the ming dynasty in 1425 and you can see the bird marks here and basically when lizard chum and his peasant rebels invaded the forbidden city and we know exactly when that was it was on june 3rd 1644 because he only spent one night in the forbidden city before going to fight the man shoes up north and so there's at that very precise moment that the tanya was destroyed and all the seals and ritual objects within it including this seal so basically you have in a single object the absolute apex of the ming dynasty and its obliteration we have here um a seal carved out of tan xiang moo sandal wood that was carved by orders of emperor kangshi in the very early years of his reign we don't know exactly when but it was carved on the base with the characters which means revere heaven and serve your people of course it's very important seal it is the largest one that kangshi emperor have ever had carved for himself and it really embodies the mandate of heaven this is the key rule if you serve heaven to revere heaven and serve your people you have the mandate to what i would say is this is the absolute foundation of the qing empides that's a very important principle for them because you have to remember that the ming dynasty just fell the reason why the man's shoes took the power from the ming their rationale is they have lost the mandate of heaven they were corrupt they didn't love the people and so therefore we as righteous and diligent rulers can't take the power from them in fact emperor yongjung and emperor channel the first seals they had carved for themselves after ascending the throne were copies of this very seal carved out of jail so um they each believed that this was the foundation of their reign the third seal that we have here and in many ways ecos this one is a seal that emperor chen long had carved for the very hall that was built on the place that where he met his grandfather emperor kangshi for the first time it was a hall that he named the dee anton the hall of grace remembrance the hall where he would every time go there and remember the grace of his grandfather someone who instructed him and spent a lot of time educating him a place in the menu and in the summer palace that they used for feasts and entertainment on the seal here you will find chennai's pledge to abide by the role of emperor kangshi and his father yongjung which he believed to be so essential to a success and you will see very few seals in the marketplace carved with imperial poems this is a seal that was covered in 1766 which is the date of the poem you can feel a little bit of self-doubt and you can see the humanity of that emperor shining through the poem where he recognizes that he's not loved by everyone and he has critics at the court and he says for all my critics i want them to remember that i work extraordinarily hard i abide by all the rules set forth by my grandfather so remember that before you criticize me what's very interesting is you you have what is probably one of the most controversial and darkest succession power struggles being referred to which is the fact that his father was the fourth son not the first son he was the full son of emperor kang shi empreche long here refers to an old tale of the jew dynasty which is reverse the foundation of dynastic history in china saying that in fact there was a king of the jew who chose his third son to be emperor so for anyone who thinks this is something that is some sort of dark plot and should not have happened well there are precedence to it on the stone you see these these marks are burning you have in fact the downfall of the chiang mai is he written in these marks in fact this seal which was placed in the iran has suffered fire damage in october 1860 when the french and british forces sacked the summer palace between these two seals you have the foundation of the ching empire you have the height of it here and the beginning of the end collectively these three seals are estimated to 230 million low estimate this one here is 125 million this one here is estimated 80 million hong kong this one here 25 million you