Help with translation

[adamb]

Hoping for some help with translating these Chinese characters written in black ink on the sheath of a recently acquired Bugis keris, which itself seems rather old. A Chinese colleague informs me that the first word seems to be a common surname (Zhang) and that the rest may be a signature and date; however, they are unable to read the latter as it does not seem to be modern Chinese.

I've put a few of the images through an image-enhancement program to better highlight the writing.

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks.

[Sajen]

I think your keris is from Malay. And sorry, can't help with a translation.

Regards,
Detlef

[adamb]

If anyone is still interested in the problem of the Chinese inscription on the sheath of the antique Bugis (possibly Bugis Malay) keris, I have enclosed here, with permission, the findings of a colleague, an academic scholar (and his reading group), with expertise in Chinese text.

I would appreciate it if any forum member has any further insight (especially into the characters in line 4), or indeed knows of any other keris with Chinese inscriptions for comparative purposes.

*****
"The script seems to consist of two parts in different styles, likely written by different people. ... The first two characters (1-2) seem to be a name—the easily-identified surname Zhang first (1), followed by a given name (2). The character for the given name is not clear. There are a few options.
a) Fei 陫.
b) Fei 啡. This second character is part of the Chinese word for coffee; the object coming from a Dutch collection suggests it belonging to someone whose family might be involved in foreign trade, possibly coffee. That said, the left-hand part of the character does not make for a particularly close match here.
c) One member of the group consulted with a colleague at Fudan who works on premodern manuscripts. He thinks that it cannot be a character at all, but suspects it to be a code from the specialised script used by merchants (something like the so-called ‘Suzhou symbols’ 蘇州碼子, or similar). But he also admitted that the whole script does not make sense to him.

3. The following character looks like yu 于, which means ‘at’. That would suggest that what follows is a place name of sorts.
An alternative reading would be gan 干, but it is not clear how this might fit with the rest of the inscription. A third character in the name of the owner—i.e. the second part of a given name, perhaps?

4. The next line is very hard to decipher. It is not even clear how many characters it comprises. One part (4a) contains an element that might be the character ‘five’ (wu 五) as used in the merchants’ code if that were a theory worth pursuing for the inscription as a whole. But the larger context suggests that this line is a place name—see below for more on this guess.

5. In the following line, we have something that looks very similar to bu 布, in comparable inscriptions; that denotes either hempen cloth or the act of propagating something. Another reading, more plausible in context to my mind, is shi 市, which denotes a market-place.

6. The following character is almost certainly xia 下, meaning ‘below’.

7. The final character seems to be suo 所, which means ‘place’

All of that would produce a reading like this:

張陫[啡?]于□□市下所.

That would give a meaning of something like: "Zhang Fei purchased [the keris] in the market of ...."

If this is a plausible reading, then the two or three characters that I have left blank (and struggled to identify elsewhere) would have to be a place name:

But none of us in the group is sufficiently familiar with Malaysian or Indonesian place names in Chinese to speculate on what it might be. Overall, a lack of knowledge about the social life of Chinese Malaysian or Indonesian communities limited our work here."

[adamb]

Apologies, in the above annotated figure for the character denoted by "4a" it should be "five" (not "at") in the brackets.