Talk:Seals of the Nguyễn dynasty

Scope of the article
As is evident by the intro, the initial drafts of this article were meant to cover only the imperial seals of the Imperial Nguyễn family (so from the Nguyễn Lords period to the Nguyễn Dynasty period) and what happened to them following the independence of North Vietnam. Due to the fact that in the "Seal (East Asia)" article Việt Nam is mentioned as an afterthought with less information about Vietnamese seals and seal culture than the Philippines on it as this was written, despite Việt Nam being a Chinese cultural country like Japan, the Ryukyu islands, and Korea, it is somewhat treated as "the red stepchild of Chinese cultural countries" in many Wikipedia articles (perhaps reflecting off-wiki biases). In fact, the article incorrectly stated that seals have been effectively abolished in modern Vietnam, despite this not being the case, though I also added the "Seals in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam" section as "a compare and contrast" with the seal culture of the Nguyễn Empire, as the scope of the article changed.

The most noticeable change was the addition of just general seal culture of the Nguyễn Dynasty as well as to whom seals were awarded (such as when receiving a noble title). Then as I had discovered more general information about the seal culture of the Nguyễn Dynasty through the Vietnamese National Archives I could fill in the parts about seal culture in general. In fact, the study of Nguyễn Dynasty seals is in itself an academic discipline and seals were used at every level of society from the very top to the very bottom, hence after adding a list of imperial seals I also added a list of government office seals.

But this then shows the contrast between the imperial seals of the Nguyễn Dynasty and the Nguyễn Lords (as the original article was intended for) and general Nguyễn Dynasty seal culture between 1802 and 1945. As the infobox is very much about the "national seal" (The Heirloom Seal of the Southern Realm) and the Vietnamese translation is specifically about the seals of the Nguyễn Imperial family. Hence the different names "Bảo", "Tỷ", "Ấn", "Chương", "Ấn chương", "Kim bảo tỷ", "Quan phòng", "Đồ ký", "Kiềm ký", "Tín ký", "Ấn Ký", and "Ký" which in European languages would simply be translated as "seal(s)".

Initially the whole "Post-1945" section was also meant in relation to the imperial seals having left Huế (the capital city of the Nguyễn Dynasty), but as I found out about more information regarding the fate of the seals after the August Revolution and in the current day I added more information, as I would think that readers interested in the subject might also want to know where you can find these seals today and how they ended up where they ended up. --Donald Trung (talk) 21:08, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

List of government office seals
I had initially created the list of government office seals to both represent the workings and functions of the Nguyễn dynasty government on the English-language Wikipedia (something which hasn't been done in much detail up until this point), and primarily to list some uploads I had made to Wikimedia Commons, but as government office seals of the Nguyễn Dynasty extended all the way down to commune and district levels I think that in the future a "List of government office seals of the Nguyễn dynasty" article should be created. As that list would simply be too extensive for this article, there are a 100+ (one-hundred plus) imperial seals, 84 (eighty-four) of which are in the National Museum of Vietnamese History in Hanoi, that is a relatively "short" and an easily manageable list, but the thousands of government office seals of the Nguyễn dynasty should have their own article if someone can actually find and import these seals to Wikimedia Commons and work them into a concise list. --Donald Trung (talk) 21:08, 10 April 2021 (UTC)


 * A bit of a later update, but I am not sure how to separate agencies from agents, so I am planning on making separate lists right above and below each other, to make one focused on an agency and the other about for example ministers, vice-ministers, Etc. --Donald Trung (talk) 15:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Also as a note, I limit the scope of the list of government seals to the province level, so I exclude prefectures, districts, Etc. because that would make the list too long, but provincial mandarins were quite notable on their own and the number of provinces was only in their 30's (thirties). This also sets a good boundary limits the scope to I think around 900 (nine-hundred) entries in total with about a hundred imperial seals, this could keep the article quite limited to the scope of the national government in the largest lines without delving too deep into local politics. So far I've been able to map out most provincial officials, but I've been unable to find a source which lists which provinces had their own governours and which ones shared their governours. --Donald Trung (talk) 07:45, 21 April 2023 (UTC)