Born Li Shutong in October 1880 in Tianjin, Master Hongyi was one of the most talented painters, dramatists, calligraphers, musicians, seal cutters and poets. As a pioneer of China’s New Culture Movement, Li taught at Zhejiang Secondary Normal School (predecessor of the Hangzhou High School) in 1912, before joining the Xiling Seal Art Society in 1914. It is during his stay at the society that Li was introduced to the Hupao Temple and ordained as a Buddhist monk on the thirteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar in 1918.

Shortly before Li became a monk, he donated the entire collection of his seals to the Xiling Seal Art Society. In line with traditions, Ye Weiming, one of the founders of the society, specially carved a niche on the stonewall along the Hongxue Path on the Solitary Hill, and put the seals in the niche. Covering the niche was a small stone tablet on which two characters “Yin Cang” (literally Seal Collection) in xiaozhuan were engraved; beside were six lines of postscript written in lishu, explaining the purpose of the collection: “May [the seals] stay with the lake and the hill forever”.

In 1963, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Xiling Seal Arts Society, 94 seals from the collection were pulled out in case they might suffer damage after long years in storage. They were among those seals regularly used by Li Shutong. Some of them were cut by established seal masters, and a few by lesser-known engravers, one of which, numbered “1769”, had long been misread as “Ge Mingyun” (戈明云) and even published in various books.

As the research on this collection deepens, these silent seals have revealed a picture of Li Shutong’s friend circle. His friendship with Ge Pengyun (戈朋云)，instead of the wrongly believed “Ge Mingyun”) also rose to the surface.

Born Ge Zhong in 1867, Pengyun was Ge’s courtesy name, which he preferred to use in public. He also went by the name of Bohu, and sometimes used the signature “Hengshoutang Ge”. Ge Kunhua (1836-1882), Pengyun’s father, taught at Harvard and was the university’s first instructor from China. His mother was Manchu, born in Zhejiang’s Ningbo city.

A pioneer in promoting Chinese culture, Ge Kunhua was a prominent figure among the Chinese literati at the time. In 1879, through E. B. Drew, a graduate of Harvard College working in Ningbo’s customs service and a Chinese-language student of Ge’s, Ge Kunhua signed a three-year contract ( September 1, 1879 to August 31, 1882) with Harvard as a Chinese language instructor, earning a monthly salary of 200 dollars. At the end of August 1879, Ge arrived at Harvard with his family and tons of Chinese books.

Although Ge stayed at Harvard for only three years, he is remembered for his three “firsts”: the first instructor from China to stand on the Harvard podium, the author of the first textbook on Chinese culture written by a Chinese for Western readers and laying the foundation for the Harvard-Yenching Library by contributing the first collections of books. Two photos of him are still hung on the wall of the library, which holds the most comprehensive East Asian collection in the Western world.

Among Ge Kunhua’s family members when they travelled to the US was his son Ge Pengyun, who was 12 at the time. Receiving a good Western education, Pengyun was already able to help transcribe for his father at Boston. In 1882, after his father passed away, Pengyun went back to Shanghai and studied at the Anglo-Chinese Methodist College, before he was enrolled at Harvard the next year. On September 18, 1899, he established the Anglo-China Society in Shanghai.

 It is at the Society that Li Shutong was said to have studied English under Ge Pengyun for over six months. Ge had already been an old friend of the extended Li family back when he worked in Tianjin. To show his gratitude, Ge carved the seal—No. 1769, one of his very rare works, and sent it to Li Shutong as a gift. Apparently, Li was very fond of the seal, as it had been used in a number of his personal letters and calligraphies. Ge Pengyun was not only a good orator, but a political activist. In 1900, he and his family were forced into exile and lived in Japan for some time after the ill-fated Hundred Days’ Reform. He died in 1927.