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I'm a East Asian preparing to celebrate the Lunar New Year and have been given these pictures of lacquered boards from my father.

The first picture

The second picture

The third picture

The first picture I suspect contains stylized Seal scripts. I cannot identify any of those 4. The second picture contains typical (semi) Cursive scripts, but I still don't have enough knowledge to identify those 2. The third picture is a weird one, I suspect it contains deformed Seal scripts, which makes it even harder. However, I would say that there are 4 characters in the third picture, the last one is impercept-ible, and the second one may be derived from 耑. To sum up, the only thing I'm sure about all of those 10 characters is that they're all Traditional Chinese.

Now I'm here to seek help. What are those characters?

By the way, Happy Lunar New Year guys!

Vincent J. Ruan
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    Well, I have a big hunch that the top right character in the first picture is 追. In fact the left hand side of both characters on the right in that picture is 辵/辶. – dROOOze Feb 04 '19 at 18:56
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    @droooze With your hint, I think the first picture is 慎終追遠, a phrase from Confucian Analects. – Vincent J. Ruan Feb 04 '19 at 20:28
  • Well, the other three characters are believable, but I can't see 終. Also, that implies that the first character 慎 is on the bottom left. – dROOOze Feb 04 '19 at 21:38
  • @droooze I'm not sure about the 2 left characters either, but I'm pretty sure about the last one, because 遠 has a variant: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%80%BA Therefore, if you're sure about your guess, then those 4 character should be 慎終追遠, because that's perhaps the only old common phrase with 追 and 遠. – Vincent J. Ruan Feb 04 '19 at 22:22
  • It is believable if 終 was restructured such that 糸 is written on the top. Well done for solving it :) – dROOOze Feb 04 '19 at 23:56
  • @droooze So, 終 is top left or bottom left? Also, do you have any clue on the second picture? I assume they're just typical Cursive. – Vincent J. Ruan Feb 05 '19 at 05:51
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    終 is top left. What I meant was, 終 was rewritten such that 糸 appears on the top of the character and 冬 appears on the bottom of the character, which explains its shape in the photo. The phrase should be 追遠慎終 to have a reading order that makes sense. Anyway, here's my guess for the second photo: 園 壽. – dROOOze Feb 05 '19 at 05:56
  • @droooze Thanks. About the second picture, the problem of your guess is that it's not a common phrase. – Vincent J. Ruan Feb 05 '19 at 09:16

1 Answers1

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Are the two characters on the left in the first photo stylized versions of 幸福, written vertically? Not sure about the 福, but the top left character sure looks like a stylized 幸? As for the character on the top right, 龍, dragon?

Ian Megill
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