The Cai clan of Cai Lun, who gave the world paper, and Cai Wenji, whose 悲憤 poem was set to a thousand years of pipa.
Say it in Mandarin: cài
How worn the ink looks — 0% is a fresh stamp, 100% is eroded stone.
Preview only. The downloaded PNG is 1024×1024.
From the Ji (姬) royal house of Zhou, through Cai Shu Du, the brother of King Wu, enfeoffed at Cai in today’s Henan; when the Cai state was swallowed by Chu its people carried the town’s name home as a surname.
The character itself is 艹 over 祭 in its old writing — the grass of the marsh, borrowing the sound of the sacrifice. Two thousand years later the same clan gave the world Cai Lun, who turned tree bark and rags into a sheet you can write on.
The surname: From Cai Shudu, real brother of King Wu who took the Shang: planted at Cai to watch over the east, his state moved three times before Chu took it for good, and the dukes’ people scattered carrying its name — 上蔡, 新蔡, 下蔡, three capitals in three exiles, the last of them in today’s Shangcai. The character first named a kind of grass the marshes grew. Full 蔡 page →
Single-surname seal: Cai Wenji’s lonely qin, or Cai Lun’s sheet of paper.
Cai is written 蔡 in Mandarin. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Cai rather than to transliterate it letter by letter, which is how Chinese names are actually made. On this page the seal is carved in the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, with the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) filling any character the main font lacks.
蔡 breaks down as 蔡 (cài) — A grass radical over the old sacrificial form — the family that kept the rites and the reed-marsh they grew them in. The seal note we would put under it: Single-surname seal: Cai Wenji’s lonely qin, or Cai Lun’s sheet of paper.
Pinyin: cài — 蔡 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop). Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and getting them wrong is the most common mistake Western speakers make with Chinese names — the seal itself is unaffected, since the carving is of the written form.
Yes. 蔡 (cài) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From Cai Shudu, real brother of King Wu who took the Shang: planted at Cai to watch over the east, his state moved three times before Chu took it for good, and the dukes’ people scattered carrying its name — 上蔡, 新蔡, 下蔡, three capitals in three exiles, the last of them in today’s Shangcai. The character first named a kind of grass the marshes grew. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 蔡 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.
蔡 is built from 蔡 — 蔡 (cài) — and no other curated name on this site shares that combination, because each entry is built around its own sound and its own meaning rather than recycled syllables. Names that start the same way as Cai are linked at the foot of this page.
From the Ji (姬) royal house of Zhou, through Cai Shu Du, the brother of King Wu, enfeoffed at Cai in today’s Henan; when the Cai state was swallowed by Chu its people carried the town’s name home as a surname. The character itself is 艹 over 祭 in its old writing — the grass of the marsh, borrowing the sound of the sacrifice. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 蔡 — is in the section above.
A Chinese seal (印, yìn) is the 3,000-year-old answer to the signature: a carved stamp, classically in red cinnabar ink, pressed onto documents, paintings and letters. A name seal carries your name in seal script (篆書) — the calligraphic style of the Qin dynasty. Traditionally two kinds: 朱文 (characters in red) and 白文 (characters in white, carved out of a solid red field).
Our generator transliterates your English name into a real Chinese name — not just sounds, but characters chosen for meaning — then carves it with an authentic seal-script font. Export is a transparent PNG you can stamp into documents, art, or tattoos.
Related to Cai: they begin like Cai.
SealsCrafter (sealscrafter.com) is a free Chinese name seal generator: it transliterates your English name into a real Chinese name — characters chosen for sound and meaning — then carves it as an authentic seal (印章) in genuine seal script. You export a transparent PNG instantly: no sign-up, no watermark, no cost. The carving uses the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, supplemented by the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) for characters the main font lacks.
A personal stamp — classically a small stone engraved with your name in seal script and pressed in red cinnabar ink — used in China, Japan and Korea for 3,000 years in place of a signature. Full guide: what is a Chinese name seal.
朱文 (zhūwén) prints the characters in red on paper; 白文 (báiwén) prints them white out of a solid red field. Both are authentic modes of carving — see zhuwen vs baiwen. Both are one click away in the generator above.
Seal (印章) is the carved stone; a chop is the same object called by its Anglo-Indian colonial-era name (from Hindi chhāp, common in Hong Kong and Singapore); a stamp is usually the modern rubber office version. More: seal vs chop vs stamp.
Yes — free, no login, no watermark. Ad-supported.
The Zhongshan King seal script (中山王篆), a Warring-States bronze-inscription style, released under the SIL Open Font License.
The seal design is yours to use. The font is OFL-licensed; exporting the image is fine for any personal or commercial use.