A Textual-Critical Reexamination of the 352 Yecheng Seal Surrender and a New Hypothesis on the Fate of the True Imperial Seal

Abstract The Qin Imperial Heirloom Seal, as the supreme symbol of orthodox imperial authority across the Qin, Han, Wei, and Jin dynasties, has long been the subject of divergent historical accounts regarding its circulation during the Sixteen Kingdoms period. Traditional official histories uniformly record that in the eighth year of the Yonghe era (352 CE), Jiang Gan, a defending general of Ran Wei at Yecheng, surrendered the seal to Eastern Jin envoys Dai Shi and He Rong in exchange for military relief, after which the seal was delivered to Jiankang, ending the Eastern Jin's decades-long humiliation as "emperors without a seal." However, a close reading of the Book of Jin, the Zizhi Tongjian, and later scholars' commentaries reveals five fatal textual anomalies in this narrative: (1) the three core participants—Jiang Gan, Dai Shi, and He Rong—who performed the highest service of restoring orthodox legitimacy to the dynasty, received no enfeoffments, no official appointments, and vanished entirely from historical records, a situation impossible under Jin bureaucratic norms; (2) as an external garrison commander, Jiang Gan had no authority to access the palace seal, which was exclusively controlled by Empress Dowager Dong and Crown Prince Ran Zhi; (3) the purported transaction of "seal for relief" collapsed logically—the Eastern Jin never dispatched a single soldier, yet no contemporary source records any protest, accusation, or diplomatic fallout from either side; (4) by contrast, Murong Jun of Former Yan received the true seal from the captured Dong and Ran Zhi, granted the special title "Lord Who Presented the Seal" (Fengxi Jun), changed his era name to "Yuanyuan," and publicly ascended the throne—a complete and verifiable political process, whereas the Eastern Jin's claim rested on paper propaganda alone; (5) when Fu Jian destroyed Former Yan in 370, exhaustive searches of Yan palaces and treasuries yielded no record of the seal, confirming it had long since been removed from any above-ground repository. This paper argues that the Yecheng seal surrender narrative was a systematic textual fabrication by the Eastern Jin to resolve its "emperor without a seal" legitimacy crisis, and that the object delivered to Jiankang was a counterfeit prop. The true Qin Heirloom Seal was in fact presented by Empress Dowager Dong and Crown Prince Ran Zhi to Murong Jun upon the fall of Yecheng, and was most likely interred with him in his mausoleum at Longcheng (modern Chaoyang, Liaoning), where it remains undiscovered to this day. This conclusion resolves all major paradoxes—the disappearance of witnesses, the absence of rewards, the Yan state's verifiable enfeoffment, Fu Jian's fruitless search, and the seal's complete break from documented circulation—and fills a millennium-long logical gap in the history of the seal's transmission. AI Statement: This paper was drafted with the assistance of AI for language translation and formatting; all arguments, textual analysis, and conclusions are the author's original scholarship.