both of which have the same meaning "made."
The six characters may be written in two lines of three, or in three lines of two, or again in one long line read from right to left; and for reasons of space, and sometimes for no apparent reason, the first two characters are omitted, e.g.
. The omission of the nien hao is rare except on a few Japanese copies of Chinese porcelain, e.g.
ta ming nien chih = made in the great Ming dynasty.
As already mentioned, the seal forms of the mark were frequently employed from the eighteenth century onwards (see p. [209]). An archaic form of seal character occurs in the Yung Lo mark which is given below.
The use of the nien hao on the Imperial wares made at Ching–tê Chên was made obligatory by a command issued in the Ching–tê period (1004–1007), when the name of the town was altered to Ching–tê Chên.
Ming Dynasty