Chopmark Lookup
Found a chopmark on a coin and want to know which character it is? Use the two methods below to find a match to your chopmark.
Draw or type the character
Sketch the chopmark you see (stroke count and order don't matter), or type the character under the canvas if you already know it. Click any match to see real chopmark photos and script variants.
Know the character? Type it:
Closest matches
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Build it from parts
If you can identify parts of the chopmark, click the parts you can see below. Every character that contains all of the selected parts will be displayed. Chopmarks represented in our library with a picture are highlighted in gold; you may click on those to see the library pictures.
If you already know a larger piece of the character (such as 殳 or 夆), paste it into the box instead. You can paste several parts at once, and every character containing all of them will be displayed: paste 禾刂 and you get 利. Up to five parts, in any order. You can still click parts in the table to narrow the results further (the parts you pasted are tinted gold). If you can also see where a part sits (the left half, the top, inside an enclosure), use the position buttons to narrow the results further; with parts pasted, the position applies to what you pasted.
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Helpful tips:
Interchangeable parts
Chopmark engravers wrote in the quick everyday hands of their time, and those hands swapped some character parts freely. If one part of an almost-match looks wrong, find it below.
= Swap freely: the same character either way
≈ Usually swap: except the pairs shown in red
≠ Never swap: different characters that only look alike
The common cases, as recorded in the historical dictionaries; not a complete catalog.
About the two Hanzi libraries. The Hanzi library holds about 27,600 characters, the everyday range plus every chopmark in the collection. The Expanded library holds about 120,000: nearly every Chinese character Unicode encodes, and 17,703 that it does not, recorded by Taiwan's CNS 11643 national standard from household, land and tax registers. Many chopmarks were cut in exactly that kind of vulgar form, which is why they are here. Such a character has no Unicode codepoint, so the card names it by its CNS code, that code works in Direct Lookup, and the copy button pastes the code, since the character itself would show as an empty box anywhere but on this site.
About the readings and meanings. The character card gives the reading in pinyin and the meaning. Where a character was also used in another language, that sense gets its own line, the Chinese ones first: Cantonese, Regional Chinese (a local dialect, with the place named when we know it) and Minority language (the Zhuang and Bouyei peoples of southern China wrote their languages with Chinese-style characters), then Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese (the old Nôm script, which wrote Vietnamese the same way) and a minority language of northern Vietnam (the Tày). "Same as" and "Variant of" name the standard character a form stands for; click it to look that character up. "Also written" lists the other characters that wrote the same Vietnamese word. A long list of borrowed words shows the first few, and "+N more" opens the rest. "A name character in Taiwan's registers" means the only record we hold of the character is an entry in Taiwan's household, land or tax registry. Where no source records a Mandarin reading, the card says so under the character, and a Cantonese or Japanese reading is listed with that language's line below the Chinese meaning.
The better you are at understanding the individual parts of the characters, the better you will be able to find a match. One way to get better at recognizing the parts is to study the radicals.
To see how the same character shifts between modern Hanzi, ancient seal script, and the calligraphy brush hands, browse the Script Style Reference, a visual listing of every chopmark in our library shown in each script style we have on file.
Look through the pages on this site, I've identified many of the chopmarks on these coins, and looking through a few examples should help you get the feel for what you're looking at on your coin. There are many chopmarks, but not as much variety as you might think, so I may show a chopmark that matches a chopmark on your coin.
Keep in mind that many chopmarks do not resemble any modern Chinese characters and you may not find a match. Don't be too frustrated, this happens quite often. Sometimes the chopmark is ancient and we have lost the meaning. Another possibility is the mark is a pseudo-character that only had meaning locally. For some chopmarks, we will never know the meaning, just move on to another one if you get stuck.