Couplet in Seal Script

For the duke's great longevity, a set of bells was cast,
For the sovereign's prowess, a precious tripod was made.

On the nineteenth day of the fourth lunar month in the tenth year of the Daoguang reign period [May 11, 1830], I selected and copied individual characters from the texts of ancient bronze vessels in my collection. Shuwei Zhang Tingji.

An accomplished poet and calligrapher, Zhang Tingji was also renowned as scholar of the inscriptions found on ancient stone memorials and bronze vessels. He owned a large collection of such materials and his calligraphy was greatly influenced by his studies in these areas. As he explained in his postscript, Zhang selected twelve individual characters from various ancient bronzes in his collection, which he copied and rearranged to form the text of this couplet. This was a common practice among calligraphers of the time, and his brief text contains a number of rare and archaic forms of ancient seal script that would have intrigued his like-minded contemporaries.