"Chinese Boxer." Topic

Nice miniature here.

link

From
link

Hope you enjoy!.

Amicalement
Armand

I wonder how "authentic" the ideograms on the disk are.

I have seen similar and Chinese people say the calligraphy is good but the only pictorial evidence I can find is this modern print

link

dān 单 – single / only / sole
hóng 红 – red / popular / revolutionary
not sure of the bottom character. It looks to be a modification of nán 男 which is male

Thanks for the translation RexMcL.
So, he is a "Sole Revolutionary Male".
Had sense.

Amicalement
Armand

The last/bottom character 勇 (yong) basically means "brave soldier" but technically refers to late Qing soldiers recruited and trained as part of the military reforms that came after the Taiping uprising. As such it began to replace the more generic word for soldier (兵 bing) on Qing military tunics. But admittedly most people recognize this through seeing it so depicted in historical movies (very common) so just take it as a generic reference to "soldier".

Taking the three characters together, 單紅勇 (single red warrior? – as discussed above) makes close to no sense. I puzzled over this and came to suspect that the painter wanted to insert a reference to 單紅 (Dan Hong), a female PLA champion sharpshooter and thus put her name above the usual sole character for soldier (勇).

The calligraphy itself is average in my view though the painter made the rather common mistake of using a modern Chinese simplified character instead of a traditional one (so 单 instead of the more historically correct 單). This seems to to me be conclusive proof that he/she was not working off a historical print or drawing in rendering this figure.

And the less said about the "Chinese characters" in the drawing Mapleleaf linked to above the better…

link

Nice photo and very informative too! The one on the left is a select guardsman (親勇 chen yong) as shown by the bottom two characters. The one to his right is a military trainer so his designation does not contain the yong (勇) character or "soldier". Both (and presumably everyone else in the photo) were attached to the Peking garrison of the 五城 wu cheng, or the five administrative districts outside the city gates, as shown by the two smaller characters on top.

This photo shows the convention as designating the region/city in smaller characters on the top, running horizontally and the type of soldier with larger characters running vertically from the center down.

In this case they were quite select troops associated with the imperial garrison so there may be some special incentive is giving all that detail.

Back the the beautifully painted figure that Tangoo linked to, if the painter had been using photographic reference, then the top two characters should be read from right to left (instead of the other round as we have all done above), so giving us 紅單 (hong dan, literally "red" and "single" but can mean a "red slip"), which does not appear to be the name of any known Qing administrative region or unit. Another argument for artistic license on the part of the painter.

Many thanks for your guidance my friend.
Glad you had enjoy the miniature.

Amicalement
Armand