The Fingerprint Museum of China, established at the Jiangsu Police Institute, will open at the end
of this year or early next year. This is the only museum of its
kind in China, featuring more than 1,000 items together with
pictures and displays for the visitors.
Most items are contracts and documents from the late Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) to the Republic of China (1912-1949). One of
the most precious items, dated September 14 of the 26th year of
Guangxu's Reign (1900), is the whole palm print of the left hand on
an inquest record of a revolutionist.
The whole palm print of the left hand of a
revolutionist, which was found in an inquest record on September 14
of the 26th year of Guangxu's Reign (1900)
There is a traditional folk saying about fingerprints in China:
when the lines of the fingerprint make a circle, Chinese people
call it a dou, a measure made of wood or bamboo for dried
grains; if it's more than half of a circle, it's called
ji, meaning winnow; and if it's less than half a circle it
is called gong, meaning bow.
The more dous people have in their ten fingers the
richer they are destined to be. An old saying goes like this: one
dou is the poor; two dous could be richer; three
or four dous could be a soybean curd seller; five or six
dous could open a pawnshop; if you have seven or eight
dous, you can sit to travel (meaning be an official and
travel by sedan); and if you have nine or ten dous you can
be very rich even you never work.
A specialist of the museum said, although it's an old saying, it
contains some scientific merit. From gong pattern to
dou pattern, the fingerprint is more and more complicated,
and according to some research result, the more complicated
fingerprint a person has, the cleverer he will be.
China was the earliest country to identify people with the
fingerprints. The expert said, discovering the truth that there's
no two people sharing the same fingerprints and using this as a
means of identification, is an invention no less important than the
famous four great inventions in China, known as gunpowder, paper
making, printing, and the compass.
An expert from the museum said, people left their fingerprints on
earthenwares from the Neolithic Age, intentionally or accidentally.
The museum has collected many of them.
Shen Guowen, the curator of the museum, said 5,000-year-old
earthenware discovered at the Hongshan Culture site of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was drawn
with special veins. Further research revealed it was a human
fingerprint.
There is more than 5,000 years of history on the technique of
fingerprint identification in China, referred to as "a technique
that never makes mistakes."
The Jiangsu Police Institute was set up in Nanjing in 1936,
which was named as the Central Police School at that time, as the
capital of the Republic of China was in Nanjing. Fingerprint scout
was listed as a formal course when it was established. The museum
also collected pictures of the leaders of the Republic of China
when they inspected the fingerprint lab of the school.
(China.org.cn by Chen Lin October 16, 2007)
