The Lock-Curse

Some characters are written in reverse. Every stroke runs opposite to the way small seal script runs, and at first glance it only feels wrong; it takes a longer look to see that the whole character has been flipped as in a mirror. When people in the trade see reversed seal characters, the first reaction is to step back — nine times out of ten it is a lock-curse.

The Shanghai middleman in antiquities put it plainly when he taught this one:

A lock-curse is not written for people to read. It is written for the people who should not read it.

Understand it, or merely take it in, and it may tether you. The one tethered is the one who read it.

Where a lock-curse is placed follows rules of its own, and it is seldom left in the open. In that gully in Guanzhong, under the mound of earth at the first small cross-mark, a flat stone lay pressed down first, and only below that a badly torn scrap of xuan paper with 2 reversed seal characters on it, weathered until the strokes are barely readable. Whoever wrote them used a brush, and the strength of the hand shows more than 10 years of practice; the back of the paper carries marks of repeated blotting — written, blotted out, written again. The person who tore the paper up and buried it deep knew someone would dig this far.

The practice of reversing has its own reasoning. The way the dealers tell it, a character written in the proper stroke order carries a breath of the person who wrote it, and reverse-stroke turns that breath around, so the character no longer answers to its writer. So anyone who really does it leaves no colophon and no signature, and changes brushes once it is done. That is why a lock-curse cannot be dated — the hand shows the training, the paper shows the dynasty, and the writer can never be traced.

Every house has its own name for it. Some of the trade call it reverse-stroke, some inverted seal-script, and in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang country they say mirror-facing characters — characters that only read smoothly when held up to a mirror, and in the moment they read smoothly the reader has been reflected in too. The names do not agree; the taboo does.

So the Mojin have a rule: don't force your way through characters you can't read, and don't look long at ones written backward. If you must keep a record, draw the outline by hand and don't trace the stroke order.