chinese export silver

For Chinese artisans, boxes have always been more than mere utilitarian objects. Over the centuries, special decorative techniques were developed in order to make them extraordinarily special, while the amount of decorative detailing lavished upon boxes is often excessive relative to the size of the object or the purpose it was made for.

Cultures vary around the world vary greatly, but one thing all cultures have in common is a fascination of the box. To determine, though, how far back the history of the box goes is nigh impossible

Was it the Ark of the Covenant that inspired this global fascination – the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians? We shall never know. While many objects served as ample fodder for Chinese silversmiths to act out their creative fantasies, nothing did it better than a box, often the smaller being the better. I should add that silversmiths from all over the world have placed the box high up on their preferred object list, but it was the Chinese silversmiths that added humour and their love of allegory into the creative mix.

This late 7th century Tang Dynasty silver gilt box from Shaanxi Province takes the form of a six lobed flower decorated with a finely hammered surface upon which repoussé, ring punched and chased decorative motifs are applied, embellished by mercury gilding. It is hard to fathom this box is 1300 years old, yet it amply demonstrates the silver-making tradition China has. The box is displaying traditional motifs that all have allegorical meaning – a sign that a definitive Chinese style was forming.

This slightly later early 9th century Tang lobed box uses the same decorative techniques and unusually depicts two flying parrots, a bird that has no relevance to Chinese culture as we know it today. Yet the decorative and creative skills are clearly firmly established.

We fast-forward to the mid-18th century the a pair of ornately decorated octagonal filigree silver boxes that came into the possession of Catherine the Great to be used as glove boxes. They are decorated with garlands and branches of flowers and foliage, partially parcel gilded and partially enamelled with blues and greens. The lids are enhanced with a branch of pomegranates and the lid handles have broken pomegranates showing their seeds – a traditional Chinese symbol to invoke many male offspring. The boxes are fully lined in silk.

The quality of workmanship of both the silver filigree and the applied parcel gilded and enamelled flowers is astonishing; while Chinese filigree work is not unusual, to have created it using cloud and wave motifs in such minute detail and to create fruits with the degree of detailing we have come to expect from Chinese ivory carving is bewildering – as is the thought of Catherine the Great requiring them to store gloves in!

We now move on to the mid-19th century and you’d be mistaken if you think this is an ornate baroque casket of some kind. It is, in fact, a table-top snuff box! It was made by Khecheong of Canton with highly elaborate trailing vine tendrils, “C” scrolling and leaves on a matted ground, the corners of the bombé base applied with large scrolled acanthus leaf and berry brackets and each side with floral garlands, also applied with a regimental badge and vacant cartouche. The lid is slightly domed and applied with a large finial modelled as a standing lion. The interior has been parcel gilded and the box is raised upon four scroll and hoof feet inset with their own integral casters.

It is an astounding piece of master silversmithing and we should not be surprised to know it was sold at auction in June, 2013 at Bonhams, London for £20,000. The regimental badge the box carries is that of the 59th [2nd Nottinghamshire] Regiment of Foot of the British Army, formed in 1755 and in 1849 sailed to China to become part of the force that imposed the terms following the First Opium War. The regiment stayed and was used again in 1858 to occupy the city of Canton in the 2nd Opium War.

Continuing on the regimental theme, this rather fine gentleman’s snuff box [above] is slightly schizophrenic in as much as it appears to be torn between neo classicism and the traditional Chinese. The lid is decorated with a high relief Chinese battle scene depicting horsemen amongst trailing chrysanthemums set within a raised foliate border – all in contrast to the reeded sides with central bands of engraved engine-turning. The box is by the retail silversmith Cutshing of New China Street, Canton and was made circa 1830 – an early and rather fine example of Cutshing Chinese Export Silver.

This is a quite remarkable cigarette box made circa 1900 by Luen Wo of Shanghai. The applied high relief tiger head orchids are simply spectacular; set against a finely planished ground, they appear to grow out of the box with their phenomenal degree of detailing in each petal and leaf. Even the manner in which the leaves extend beyond the rolled ridge lid line on each side is a stroke of genius.

To the Western eye, at first glance this box would seem to depict irises, but although a Chinese flower, they are not traditionally used as an allegorical floral motif unless, strangely enough, they are partnered with orchids; then they become a symbol of friendship. It was the Japanese that made the iris a popular decorative motif.

The tiger-head orchid is very similar to the iris, with ragged petals and almost identical leaves. A native to Yunnan, it was prized for its delicate fragrance and was always associated with elegance. As a result, irises are particularly associated with women, love, beauty and fertility. Because of their association with refinement, the word “orchid” or lánxin [literally “orchid heart”] was used as an adjective to describe items of refinement. A tastefully decorated room was ‘an orchid room” [lánfang].

Was this box made for an elegant and refined woman? We shall never know. What is interesting is that the irises and the entire box have the hint of the “Arts and Crafts Movement” about them, which perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at given Shanghai at the time this box was made was a stylish cosmopolitan city that rivalled Berlin and Paris.

Allegory is at the heart of almost all Chinese decorative style. This tiny box, measuring just 8cm in length, is both stunning and packed with subtle meaning. Made circa 1895 by the Beijing silversmith Wu Hua, it takes the overall form of a peach fruit surmounted by a bat, with the sides having a banded meander border top and bottom framing a garland of lotus flowers.

To understand what is a veritable hand grenade of allegory, we must deconstruct it motif by motif.

Peaches are the ubiquitous symbol of longevity and immortality in traditional Chinese art; as such, it is considered one of the most important symbols.

According to Daoist lore, the peaches of immortality grew in the garden of the goddess Xi Wángmŭ, also known as the Queen Mother of the West. At her birthday celebrations that occurred every 3000 years, she is believed to distribute her special peaches to her heavenly guests and in doing so grants them eternal youth and immortality

The combination of bars and peaches is actually one of the most widely used allegorical combinations in Chinese art. In the context of this box, the meaning to be conveyed is “May both blessings and longevity be complete in your life”.

The meander border is not related whatsoever to the Greek key design; it is a totally Chinese motif in this context and it also denotes longevity and immortality. The lotus flower garland, again in the context of this box, represents longevity – it also has strong Buddhist associations. The lotus rises undefiled and in all its glory from impure muddy waters, implying it stands as a model to try to live a life of integrity and purity in what is otherwise a mundane world.

Natural fragrances and perfumes are very much an integral part of Chinese culture; Daoists believed that the soul of a plant was released in its fragrances. Perfumes were divided into six moods: tranquil, reclusive, luxurious, beautiful, refined or noble. The sensibility of Chinese scholar poets and writers who steeped themselves in the ephemeral nature of beauty clearly depict the practice and use of a heightened awareness of scent to enhance all forms of experience is clearly demonstrated in this excerpt from this Tang Dynasty poem written by Wang Wei “A Song of a Girl from Loyang”:

…On her painted pavilions, facing red towers,

Cornices are pink and green with peach-bloom and with willow,

Canopies of silk awn her seven-scented chair,

And rare fans shade her, home to her nine-flowered curtains.

The reticulated box [above] by Wang Hing was originally designed to contain a source of natural fragrance. The dragon is both revered as a mythical animal and a potent symbol of strength, good fortune and transformation. The mystical faming pearl the dragon is forever chasing is often viewed as a metaphor for wisdom, enlightenment and spiritual essence. Dragons are traditionally in pursuit, desperately reaching out to clutch the elusive object while travelling through swirling clouds, mists and shadows – eyes bulging in the anticipation of achieving the prize of clutching the flaming pearl.

The dragon continues his eternal chase on this casket; a box that is slightly at odds with itself in as much as it is essentially a neo-classical casket that at birth succumbed heavily to the high Chinese decorative style. The applied high relief dragon motif is exquisitely executed in great detail, its fangs protruding independent of the main body of the box. Made by Zee Wo, a well-known Shanghai retail silversmith, it is one of the finest examples bearing the Zee Wo mark I’ve seen.

Even the smallest, most mundane of of boxes does not escape the generosity of care and artistic flair of the Chinese silversmith.

Here we have a Chinese Export Silver matchbox slip cover bearing the mark of the Hong Kong and Canton retail silversmith Kwong Man Shing. Silver slip covers seems to have been more prevalent than vesta cases in China in the late 19th century. They weren’t just a male accoutrement; small matchboxes were made especially for women and they too were encased in silver.

Above right we have a lady’s matchbox slip by Yi Tai, a rare maker to find, who was operating in Shaanxi Province in North West China – an area of China that was ceded to the Russian Empire in the Treaty of St Petersburg in 1881. It is also the same area the Tang Dynasty box mentioned at the beginning of this article came from.

A box, by nature, will always have an element of surprise. Chinese silversmiths, not known for their bashfulness, tended to allow the boxes they created to wear the surprises on the outside. A case of “what you see, you get”? Not always, it seems, if Catherine the Great be a good example. Oh, how she would love that! The very woman who said:

“I shall be an autocrat, that’s my trade; and the good Lord will forgive me, that’s his”

“A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache”

Adrien von Ferscht is the only academic carrying out in-depth research into Chinese Export Silver in the context of The China Trade and the 1200 year history of Chinese silver making. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research, he the Expert for Chinese Export Silver for Auctionata and now consults for Heritage Auctions for this unique silver category and he is a Worthologist at WorthPoint.

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

His new 250-page 3rd Edition “Collectors’ Guide to Chinese Export Silver 1785-1940” is the largest information reference resource for this unique silver category is available at: http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Thanks to Danny Cheng for his translation skills.

Acknowledgements: Heritage Auctions, Dallas; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Bonham’s, London; Rago Arts & Auction Center, Lambertville, New Jersey; Aspire Auctions, Cleveland & Pittsburgh; International Auction Gallery, Anaheim, California; Honolulu Museum of Art

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CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Standing on Ceremony 中國出口銀器: 講究禮儀

Chinese culture is so enriched with allegorical imagery that one could almost say it is its very foundation. As with any world culture, it is an osmotic accumulation of influences from outside and within China over the millennia, manifesting itself in ceremonial and decorative objects in combinations that are themselves often wonders in their own right.

One particular object is the result of a virtual metamorphosis of usages, beliefs, superstitions and myths; as an object it literally stands out of the crowd of symbolic phenomena.

The huabiao is an ornamental totemic pillar that today we might see made of stone or marble. It is certainly not how it began life and it was never conceived to be made of silver, yet to my surprise I was confronted with a pair of Chinese Export Silver huabiao recently; certainly the only silver huabiao I’ve ever encountered. They were made by a Beijing silversmith by the name of Bao Xiang; a silversmith I have to say I’ve never previously encountered, not to be confused with Bao Xing of Canton and with Bao Xing of Nanjing, but obviously a silversmith of significant skill as we can see from the image below.

Chinese Export Silver Huabiao

These huabiao columns tell a story in themselves; one can take a stroll through the allegorical imagery and almost get lost, but to fully understand that collective meaning, it is important to discover how the huabiao developed over thousands of years and what it came to represent.

Having said that, it is actually difficult to determine exactly when and why these pillars originated. If we would rely on legend, then we need to travel back 4000 years to the reigns of Emperors Yao and Shun; the era when China’s moral and ethical codes of conduct were formulated. Then, huabiao were made of wood and served as landmarks and it is believed their shape and form are derived from an ancient dagger. As landmarks they were used to show soldiers on the march the direction to go. They then evolved another use when common people were encouraged to post comments and suggestions for their ruler on the posts. In this guise, the posts were known as feibang zhi mu [wood of direct speech] or bangmu, for short. The creation of the feudal system in the Zhou dynasty, just over 3000 years ago, put an end to this practice when suggestions from the commoners were replaced with carvings of dragons, the symbol of Imperial power.

Another school of thought believes Huabiao originated 2600 years ago as an ancient instrument of measurement; a pole would have been driven into the ground where a proposed building was to be erected. The pole, known as a “Biao”, cast a shadow that aided designers to determine appropriate directions.

As the use changed over the centuries, so did their appearance. They became more ornate, marble or stone was the preferred material, the base was typically either circular or octagonal surrounded by an ornate balustrade or railings.

Huabiao often come in pairs, yet probably the most famous huabiao in China are to be found in Beijing by Tian’anmen [The Gate of Heavenly Peace] at the entrance to the Forbidden City. These columns were created in the Qing Dynasty and as with all huabiao, they have a majestic looking beast known as “Denlong” or “Hou” perched on top.

The mythical dragon had nine children according to legend; the Hou is one of them. It is purported to have the habit of watching the sky; its specific role in life as guardian atop a huabiao is to communicate the mood of the people below to the heavens above. The hou maintains order in the cosmos and also represents power and good fortune.

Here we can compare the hou atop one of the Tian’anmen columns to the Bao Xiang version. The latter is a very stylised interpretation of the more intricate classical hou we are more likely to encounter in stone. But even though Bao Xiang is a Beijing silversmith, his silver columns are clearly not faithful copies of the more famous Beijing huabiao.

The Tian’anmen four are particularly regal, The pair guarding the entrance to the palace have the hou looking away out to the distance demonstrating the people’s longing for the Emperor’s return should he travel out of the palace. This was also meant to remind rulers not to become infatuated with the beauty of the landscapes of their domain and to return in a timely fashion to continue running affairs of state. These pillars are given the name of wangjungui [looking forward to the Emperor’s return]. The pair inside the gate looking inwards, reminding the Emperor they were expected not to be beguiled by the sensual pleasures of the palace, but to leave the palace in order to have a better understanding of the common people and their needs, hopes and aspirations. These pillars are given the name wangyunchu [expecting his Majesty to go on an inspection]. Whereas they once kept rulers mindful of their role, today one could say they are a warning to the ruled.

The swirling dragon on the main column of a huabiao represent the imperial power of the Emperor, or Son of Heaven. The hou sits majestically upon a dew-collecting tray under which is a stylised cloud that is a symbol of the delineation between heaven and earth. The octagonal base plinth represents the solid foundations of the earth. Usually, crowning the balustrade or railings are small creatures known as suan ni [see examples below], the fifth son of the dragon and symbolic of imperial good fortune. The whimsical horizontal element towards the top is known as the cloud board

Huabiao are to be found at the entrances to palaces, bridges, imperial tombs, ceremonial gates and spirit roads [an ornate road leading to a Chinese tomb of a notable dignitary]. The latter huabiao are known as shen dao zhu [spirit way columns] – seen towards the middle of the picture. We can see examples here in this late 18th watercolour painting of the Ming Tombs in Changping, about 50 kilometres from Beijing and the subsequent photographic image. The auspicious animal-lined avenue is the “spirit way” leading to the mausoleum complex.

Ming Tombs Beijing 18th century watercolour

But the huabiao has evolved to become such an iconic symbol that it appears on coinage and currency.

Here we can see it on a 1999 version of the 50 Renminbi note and below we have it on a 1 and 2 ounce special 1997 silver coinage edition.

While this official Chinese government publicity material for the Beijing Olympic Games incorporated a huabiao at the very heart of this collage of Chinese cultural imagery drawn from the centuries of Chinese history.

Above we have one of a pair of huabiao that now stand in the grounds of Peking University, having been relocated from their original home in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

Here [right] we have the superb contrast of the modern towers of Dalian city with the majestic huabiao standing in Xinghai Square. Originally a small fishing village that became a city that was occupied in the 19th century by a succession of British, Japanese and Russian occupations, Dalian is today a modern city of 3.3 million with a 19th century district at its heart.

The Chinese equivalent of an Oscar is — yes, you’ve guessed it – a huabiao. Created originally in 1957, the award ceremony is held in Beijing and has ten versions for various Chinese film categories.

The final stop for the huabiao in its 4000 year evolution from wooden milestone through several thousand years in imperial splendour can only be this rendition of Tian’anmen complete with a pair of huabiao in LEGO! While it is an impressive model, one cannot help being slightly miffed at the degree of detail Lego devote to its product range in China than it does in the West!

Returning to our pair of Chinese Export Silver columns. We can only wonder why they were made. They carry no inscription, so it is doubtful they were made as a trophy piece. They are not particular faithful to their Tian’anmen cousins, so it is doubtful they might be presentation souvenirs. About the only thing we can know is that they are fairly unique, they are of superb quality and they are culturally faithful in detailing to a traditional huabiao. One could theorise that given the hou dragons are removable, perhaps they might have been originally planned to have detachable alternative bobèche sconces so they could be used as candlesticks. The columns stand at 29.5cm, so the height would be right. The columns also weigh a combined 839gm, so they are heavy enough to be used as candlesticks even though they have no additional loading – the amount of silver in the bases gives the weight, the columns themselves are hollow although made of heavy gauge silver.

The columns are being offered as a single lot pair in a Fine Silver & Objects of Vertu Sale on Wednesday 12th February 2014 at Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, UK . During the past year, I have been keenly aware of a noticeable rise in the amount of important items of Chinese Export Silver coming to auction as well as a marked increase of interest in the lots as well as eventual hammer value. This is a highly significant lot and a rare pair of Chinese Export Silver objects that are richly endowed with Chinese decorative imagery.

I leave you with this nostalgic view of Tian’anmen taken in 1901 in its natural state, unadorned in bright red we are familiar with today and the landscaping in front before it was became a concrete square. The huabiao stood the test of time and stand today in exactly the spot where they were first erected.

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

Adrien von Ferscht is the only academic carrying out in-depth research into Chinese Export Silver in the context of The China Trade and the 1200 year history of Chinese silver making. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

He is “Expert for Chinese Export Silver” for Auctionata for this unique silver category and he is a Worthologist at WorthPoint.

His new 250-page 3rd Edition “Collectors’ Guide to Chinese Export Silver 1785-1940” is the largest information reference resource for this unique silver category is available at: http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Thanks: Danny Cheng, for his translation skills. David Rees at Dreweatts

Acknowledgments: Dreweatts, UK; United States Library of Congress; Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China; Lego China; Peking University

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Standing on Ceremony 中國出口銀器: 講究禮儀 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Culture Shock! 文化震撼

I have chosen to start 2014 with a rant! Humour me while I do.

For two years now I have been striving to increase both an awareness and understanding of Chinese Export Silver by writing articles that disseminate optimal information in what I hope is a readable format. In the main, I am succeeding if only the amount of emails I receive now, compared with two years ago, is a meaningful indicator. In those two years I have become more or less immune to the occasional attack, mainly by self-appointed “purists” who regard this silver category as the prodigal son who moved back into the neighbourhood of the “more established” and “gentrified” silver categories. But when a broadside attack was received recently from someone who comes under the heading “cultural think tank professional”, I have to admit I had a Joan Rivers moment and lost my cool in true Rivers’ style!

I have written before about a degree of inherent snobbery that does exist in the auction and antique world which I have fallen victim to in the past when I have had the temerity to compare specific examples of Chinese Export Silver to the master silversmiths of the Georgian period of British silver making and its European counterparts. I have long stopped donning my crash helmet since I’ve discovered faith in my own convictions and recognised that most of the time these counter-criticism are usually a case of “the lady doth protest too much”. A recent article about a pair of Chinese Export Silver huabiao columns caused a volley directed at me from several directions that all strangely had their origin in Greece amongst the defenders of cultural heritage there. As a result, I probably have a better understanding of how Xerxes might have felt; I should have known better not to realise that a British person discussing the cultural heritage of columns might be a moot point to a Greek given the antics of Lord Elgin and his contemporaries!

ELGIN MARBLES, 1816. ‘The Elgin Marbles! or John Bull buying Stones at the time his numerous Family want Bread!!’ Cartoon by George Cruikshank, 1816, showing a conflicted John Bull purchasing the Greek sculptures from Lord Elgin at a time when the economy was bad in England.

In my quest to raise awareness of Chinese Export Silver, I have consciously chosen to share as much knowledge as I can, drawing on my research findings. I have found that examples of this very unique silver category are a superb vehicle to convey so many facets of Chinese culture and history across a wide spectrum of disciplines; the fact they are intrinsically attached goes a long way in making Chinese Export Silver so unique and so interesting.

It has taken me two years for people supposedly in the know to begin to grasp that I am talking about a large and highly significant silver category, yet still Chinese Export Silver seems to present an ice cold water situation where academics and auction house experts dip their toes in and swiftly take them out, declaring they are still not sure. The quality is undeniable and it really isn’t rocket science to understand that over a 150 year manufacturing period, some 10,000 silver workshops across China produced a massive amount of silver objects. I’m tiring of having to carry this crash helmet around with me, but those that know me well understand how tenacious I can be; doubting Thomases beware!

One of my many mantras, the fact that Chinese Export Silver is an ideal vehicle to demonstrate Chinese culture, was upheld towards the end of 2013 when what seemed like a plethora of superb objects were presented to me for identification. I have chosen four to share with you and hopefully prove my point.

Miniature ships were a favourite subject of Chinese silversmiths in the 19th century and this has to be one of the most superb examples I’ve ever come across. This particular example was made circa 1895 by the Hong Kong silversmith Guang Ji and displays superb detailing

The junk was developed over 1000 years ago in the Sung Dynasty; they were highly sophisticated ocean-sailing craft, Sung being the Chinese age of invention and discovery far advanced to Europe which wasn’t to see its own renaissance until some 400 years later. We are all familiar with the word “junk”; it is a word derived from the Malayan djong, meaning boat. The Sung developed this ship when it lost its northern empire and overseas trade became an even higher priority. The resultant junk was the ideal craft for the South China Seas; it’s strong hull was able to combat the frequent violent typhoons. The hull had a series of partitions that both strengthened it and provided watertight compartments that were invaluable when it was necessary to carry out repairs at sea. Traditionally built without a keel (allowing access to shallow waters), the junk is ill-equipped to sail a straight course until an important innovation of the Song period – the addition of the sternpost rudder. This is a large heavy board which can be lowered on a sternpost when the junk moves into deep water. Coming below the bottom of the boat, and capable of hinging on its post, it fulfils the function both of keel and rudder. Until this time, throughout the world, the conventional method of steering a boat had been by means of a long oar projecting from the stern.

Another innovation on the Chinese junk is multiple masts. Marco Polo described sea-going junks as “having four masts, with a further two which can be raised when required. Each mast has square-rigged sails that concertina on themselves, when reefed, in the manner of a Venetian blind”.

Flags were hung from the masts to bring good luck and women to the sailors. A legend among the Chinese during the junk’s heyday regarded a dragon which lived in the clouds. It was said that when the dragon became angry, it created typhoons and storms. Bright flags, with Chinese writing on them, were said to please the dragon. Red was best, as it would induce the dragon to help the sailors.

This Chinese Export Silver pagoda was created in the latter part of the 19th century by Ju Xing Zheng Ji; a highly intricate piece of silversmithing. It remains a mystery whether this is meant to be a faithful copy of an actual pagoda or if it a fanciful notion of one. Certainly, it is not the famous 9 storey Canton pagoda that guards the Bogue, although it is uncannily similar in other architectural. There is the seven storey Lung Wha pagoda, though, in Shanghai – another traditional silver manufacturing city, the pagoda roof curves most like the silver version.

As familiar as the junk is when thinking of China, the next object has to be ubiquitous in the minds of Western cultures in relation to concepts of the ideal Chinese landscape. Again, a masterpiece of the silversmith’s art, this pagoda was created around the same time as the junk ship.

I’m just reaching for my crash helmet again as I’m about to reveal that the pagoda does not originate in China; it evolved from the stupa in the Indian subcontinent. Although the origins of the word pagoda are somewhat obscure, the Chinese word for stupa is ta, an abbreviated translation [tapo] of the sanskrit word stupa. However, there’s a parallel school of thought that believes the popular word pagoda did not derive from Sanskrit but originated in Sri Lanka where the stupa were called dhata-gabbha [dhata meaning “relics”; gabbha meaning “cavern”]. This gradually became corrupted to dhagabbha or the vernacular dhagoba. When the later Portuguese began coming to the region, they found the word dhagoba difficult to pronounce and this subsequently became corrupted to pagoda, both for the Portuguese and the local inhabitants.

Left: The Lunghua pagoda in Shanghai, built, 977AD. Right: The Pazhou pagoda at the mouth of the Boca Tigris [Bogue] at Canton from a painting by William Heine painted in 1853. The pagoda was built in 1597 in the Ming style along with its sister Chigang pagoda at the other end of the Bogue as Fengshui to facilitate safe navigation along the Pearl River

The origin of the pagoda lies in Buddhism where it was originally built for the purpose of preserving the remains of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism. Before the pagoda was introduced to China, it had already gone through various transitional developments in India. Apart from serving as tombs, pagodas were created as grottoes or temples for offering sacrifices to ancestors. After entering China, the pagoda took on distinct visual Chinese characteristics; Buddhist iconography became so well incorporated into native Chinese traditions that a unique system of symbolism developed.

Chinese pagodas attract lightning strikes because of their height. As with our silver pagoda, many pagodas have a decorated finial at the top of the structure, and when made of metal, this finial, sometimes referred to as a “demon-arrester” is believed to act as a lightning conductor; a dubious belief at best since there was no understanding of connecting the finial to the earth.

The oldest stone constructed Bhuddist pagoda in China that remains is to be found at Songyue [above] and was built in 523 AD. Unique in form, having 12 sides, it is easy to see this is a pagoda that still retains Indian influences yet is beginning to develop Chinese elements. At the base of the door pillars are carvings shaped as lotus flowers and the pillar capitals have carved pearls and lotus flowers. After the first storey there are fifteen closely spaced roofs lined with eaves and small lattice windows. The pagoda features densely clustered ornamental bracketed eaves in the dougong style ornamenting each story. Inside the pagoda, the wall is cylindrical with eight levels of projecting stone supports for what was probably wooden flooring originally. Beneath the pagoda is an underground series of burial rooms to preserve cultural objects buried with the dead. The inner most chamber contained Buddhist relics, transcripts of Buddhist scriptures and statues of Buddha.

Doungong, literally meaning “cap and block” is a unique structural element used in Chinese architecture, originating in the Tang and Sung Dynasties and was highly sophisticated. Here [below] we see traditional dougong bracketing. They were both a decorative and practical wooden component network that with columns, beams, purlins and lintels inter-connected with tenon joints to form a flexible, earthquake-resistant structure – particularly high multi-storey structures.

The concept and tradition of dougong has recently been brought into the 21st century by incorporating the core principles into the new 42 story Dougong Tower in Beijing [right]. The design of this tower adapts the principle of joining and interlocking to drive both the architecture and the structure. As with the pagoda, it is built to be earthquake-resistant. Is Rui Guo’s proposed vertical gardened MoMa Tower for New York the ultimate Chinese pagoda [below left]?

Both the silver pagoda and the junk ship will appear in auction later this year on May 21st 2014 at Halls Fine Art Auctioneers in the UK.

Back to Guang Ji and remaining vaguely on the tower theme, the next article is diminutive, exquisite and jam-packed with allegorical meaning. As with pagodas, bamboo is such an inimical Chinese image.

Here we have a Chinese Export Silver spice shaker complete with grinding mechanism, made by Guang Ji and made circa 1900. As we can see below, it is inspired by a newly sprouting bamboo shoot. Bamboo is the most popular plant in China; it is also the fastest growing plant on the planet. To be Chinese is to feel at home with bamboo.

In the “Order of the Four Gentlemen” [the seasons], bamboo represents the spirit of summer. The bamboo is considered to be a gentleman with perfect virtues since it combines upright integrity with accommodating flexibility; it has a perfect of grace and strength [ying and yang]. Like a self-cultivated scholar in hermitage, it is ready to render services when called upon. Bamboo personifies the life of simplicity. It produces neither flowers nor fruit. When the young shoots emerge from the roots, they are under the shade of the older bamboo branches. Such a spirit reflects the young respecting the old as well as the old protecting the young.

Pronounced zhú in Chinese, it is easy to understand how the ideogram character mark was devised by comparing it with the bamboo culm pattern on the spice shaker.

The last object that I present for your delectation is a small box highly decorated with a bat made by the Tientsin silversmith Qing Yun in the mid 19th century. As with most small Chinese Export Silver boxes, they come as virtual hand grenades of allegorical meaning. It is plain to see that this silversmith has clearly taken great delight in lavishing many hours of work to create this tiny masterpiece.

The bat is feeding off a stylised peach fruit. In traditional Chinese art, peaches are a symbol of longevity and immortality. According to Daoist lore, the peaches of immortality grew in the garden of the goddess Xi Wángmŭ, also known as the Queen Mother of the West. At her birthday celebrations that occurred every 3,000 years, she is believed to distribute her special peaches to her heavenly guests and, in doing so, granted them eternal youth and immortality. The combination of bats and peaches is one of the most widely used allegorical combinations in Chinese art. In the context of this box, the meaning to be conveyed is “May both blessings and longevity be complete in your life.”

The box is part of a collection held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA; a highly eclectic collection of art and artefacts from the travels of Isabella Stewart Gardner who amassed the collection of master and decorative arts over 3 decades at the end of the 19th century. Fenway Court, purpose built by Mrs Stewart Gardner to house the collection, is where the collection sits today.

[Left] “Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice” painted by Anders Zom in 1894; a woman with an obvious zest for life and a highly sophisticated sense of style she wished to share with an entire nation.

I have seen and researched many hundreds of items of Chinese Export Silver in the past two years. I have never found one that failed to take me on a cultural journey. Few silver objects from the Western world can lay to the same claim; that and the sheer mastery of the silversmith’s art is what makes Chinese Export Silver so unique.

I began this article with a rant caused by self-appointed purists who bizarrely criticised the pillaging of Chinese art by Westerners. I say bizarre since the clue is in the very handle “Chinese Export Silver”; silver made ostensibly for export. I was also criticised for being an academic who appeared to them to promote auction houses. That is not what I do at all. If it were not for auction houses holding sales and bringing to my notice items of Chinese Export Silver, I would probably be oblivious to the existence many of these superb objects; I also could not share them and their cultural history and significance in my articles. Often, it is these objects from auction houses that are the source of discovery for identifying previously unidentified Chinese silversmiths. There is no taboo in linking academia with the commercial world that auction houses occupy. It seems to me to be a perfectly logical co-existence. It has been accepted for decades in the world of fine art, yet for some inexplicable reason otter than some strange version of inverted snobbery it is not acceptable for artefacts. Methinks the lady really doth protest a tad too much!

Chinese Export Silver has lain dormant and unnoticed in the Western world for the past century or more in vast quantities – so much so that we have probably only seen the tip of the iceberg as it slowly becomes rediscovered. Through that discovery we can learn so much about a rich culture most of us are not really aware of; a culture totally different to the West and a culture much of which pre-dates Western culture by centuries. Equally, our rediscovery is fuelled indirectly by the growing interest by Chinese to “repatriate” legitimate exports of the 18th and 19th centuries and in doing so rediscover facets of their own culture lost in the political turmoil of the 20th century.

Time for purists to get slightly more real, methinks. Culture, by and of all its definitions, is “of the people” and should not be the preserve of or falsely protected by intellectuals and academics.

Now where’s that crash helmet!

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously with WorthPoint. Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

His Catalogue of Chinese Export Silver Makers’ Marks [1785-1940] is the largest collector’s guide for Chinese Export Silver available, with information on 200 makers and 250 pages of in-depth history. It is updated every 6-8 months and is only available as a download file. The single purchase price acquires the Catalogue plus all subsequent editions free of charge. Adrien also encourages people to share images and ask questions. The Catalogue is available at:

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments:

To Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Joan Rivers World Enterprises; Halls Fine Art Auctioneers, UK; Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library; Salem; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Culture Shock! 文化震撼 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The Cultural Crossovers of Incense

中國出口銀器: 中外文化結合的香 #ChineseExportSilver

The relationship and benefits between humans and incense may be likened to butterflies to flowers and trees to the sun. This, in itself, is a very Confucian concept.

The use of incense in Chinese culture dates to around 450 BCE, but by the Tang period incense was commonly used and no longer just within the confines of religious ritual and medicinal practices. It was therefore towards the end of the Tang Dynasty [618-906 AD] that the use of incense by the Chinese began its journey across several religious cultures and philosophies, becoming somewhat entangled along the way to emerge by the Ming Dynasty as something definitively Chinese, albeit with a confused history.

Stick incense was a development of the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644].In the West we commonly refer to stick incense as “joss sticks”; the word “joss” is actually from that wonderful language we know as pidgin – the word is an 18th century derivation of the Portuguese word “deos”, meaning god – the Portuguese only relinquished Macau in 1999.

Incense has always been an Eastern phenomenon, regarded in the West as exotic unless taken in the context of Christian religious ritual, where its roots lie in the Middle East. With the advent of Chinese Export Silver in the late 18th century, while there was no widespread use of incense in Europe and North America, there was a widespread use of tapers or spills in an age where the flame was the only source of light and heat; no particular connection between their use and stick incense. During the same period in China, both the use of bamboo spills and bamboo incense sticks was widespread, although the latter was not as prevalent as it had been in ancient China.

Chinese Export Silver, in its early years, strove to faithfully copy Western English Georgian silver and its counterparts in Europe and it is here that we see an item of silver emerging that is the product of the crossover of East-meets-West; the spill vase.

Here we have a particularly fine pair of spill vases by Wang Hing circa 1890, taking the form reticulated dragon in clouds cylinders standing upon three splayed dragon head feet that display an unusual attention to detailing. The vases have Bristol blue liners; probably made in England since blue glass was not typically Chinese.

I have seen these vases often described as bud vases or rather annoyingly as toothpick holders; bud vases were made in Chinese Export Silver, but these straight-sided objects were definitely intended to have a dual functionality – a spill vase for the Western export market and an incense stick holder for the Chinese market. They were never intended as toothpick holders. Although wooden toothpicks were invented in America in 1869, the craze for toothpicks in America only took off at the turn of the century. In the UK, the Georgian’s used goose quills and before that porcupine, unless a silver or gold pick was to hand. It was not particularly accepted in polite society to be seen using a toothpick. Given Chinese Export Silver spill vases were almost always made as a pair, it implies they were made to use on a table – to have toothpick holders actually on a dining table is highly unlikely. The Georgians did have silver toothpick holders, but given the pick was a quill then a holder was designed so that the quills became an augmentation of the object – they were also not used on a table but usually used only when the ladies had withdrawn and the gentlemen had their port and cigars.

On the left we have an English silver spill vase dated 1890. Interestingly, it has its own integral vesta holder complete with striking plate. I stress my use of the word “interestingly” because Chinese Export Silver makers made an extraordinary number of silver vesta box covers. There were probably three reasons for this; smoking, lighting spills and, dare I mention it, opium. There were also smaller covers made for what were known as ladies’ matches. On the right we have a Wang Hing matchbox slip cover circa 1895, making it a distant relation to the spill vase.

Chinese silversmiths seem to have lavished much attention to creating extraordinary spill vases, almost to the point of it being reverential.

Here we have a deliciously fanciful pair of vases by Chang Kong, circa 1890. Again, a reticulated cylindrical body with Bristol blue glass liner supported by the splayed tail of a Koi carp.

Above we have three examples of Chinese Export Silver spill vases, all made by Wang Hing. What they have in common are their feet; they all have splayed qilin [kilin] feet – the mythical hoofed creature that features in Chinese culture as one of the nine sons of a dragon [see below]. Its nearest Western equivalent is probably the unicorn.

As you will note from the various images of Chinese Export Silver spill vases, they are almost always straight-sided; bud vases and posy vases are normally trumpet shaped. The pair below is yet another example from Wang Hing and also firmly sitting upon qilin feet.

As I previously conjectured, Chinese silversmiths probably invested so much attention to detail for what is essentially a very modest object because of the position and respect incense held by default within Chinese culture, even though the objects in question were probably destined for another use if they found their way to the West where they were used for tapers or even on a lady’s dressing table for hatpins. Although we can see that Wang Hing was the predominant purveyor of spill vases, we need to remember that Wang Hing was a retail silversmith being supplied by a plethora of artisan silversmiths, so the intensity of workmanship is being lavished by quite a number of individual makers.

When the ancient Chinese formed cults to worship gods and their ancestors, they usually burned sacrifices or certain plants to create a heavy smoke in the belief they could communicate with spirits through the ascending smoke.

The development of incense culture in China has a long history, being born in the time of high antiquity, sprouted in pre-Qin Dynasty, formed in the Dynasties of Qin and Han, developed in Six Dynasties, matured in the Dynasties of Sui and Tang, culminated in Dynasties of Song and Yuan and was widely used in the Dynasties of Ming and Qing.

Incense use developed in China to include cultural activities, religious ceremonies, ancestor veneration and traditional Chinese medicine. It is known as xiang [Wade-Giles Hsiang] loosely meaning “fragrance”. Edward Hetzel Schafer, the distinguished Sinologist, wrote that in medieval China “there was little clear-cut distinction among drugs, spices, perfumes, and incenses – that is, among substances which nourish the body and those which nourish the spirit, those which attract a lover and those which attract a divinity.”

Along with the introduction of Buddhism in China came calibrated incense sticks and incense clocks [xiangzhong "incense clock" or xiangyin "incense seal”]. The poet Yu Jianwu [487-551 AD] first recorded them: “By burning incense we know the o’clock of the night, With graduated candles we confirm the tally of the watches.” The use of these incense timekeeping devices spread from Buddhist monasteries into secular society.

The most primitive incense clock is a graded incense stick; the time elapsed is registered by the speed at which the trail of incense is consumed. Powdered incense was formed into a stick of hardened paste and graded for hourly intervals. There are three common types of post-16th century incense seals. All consist of a metal base, tray for the ash bed and powdered incense, perforated grid pattern [the seal] and perforated cover. The utensils include a tamper and a small shovel, stored in the base which insulates the burner. A bed of wood ash is put into the tray and tamped. The grid is placed on the ash and the sharp end of the shovel traces the path of the grid. Powdered incense is placed in the groove and smoothed. The grid is removed and small bamboo pegs, each stamped with an hour character, are placed at regular intervals along the incense track. The seal is then covered with the perforated lid to protect the incense from draughts, and the incense is ignited. The types are: the single seal, round, square or rectangular; the double square seal having two trays and two different seal grids stacked one on top of the other; and the Ju’i sceptre, in the shape of the ancient sacred mushroom.

A rarer type is the dragon vessel [see below] of bronze, silver, silver gilt or lacquered wood, lined with pewter and fitted with V-shaped wire racks to hold an incense stick. A more esoteric Chinese device for measuring time, it had strings with metal weights that were suspended perpendicular to the body at regular intervals, or at one place only, depending on the specific use; when the heat from the burning incense ignited the string, the balls fell into a metal platter over which the dragon was suspended. The resulting clatter served as an alarm for the light sleeper.

Below we have a late 19th century Chinese Export Silver incense stick holder engraved throughout with stylised flowers, swirling dragons and bamboo motif around a central flaming pearl.

In ancient China, the equivalent of today’s Karaoke party was for high-ranking families to invite people to appreciate their collection of incenses. Sadly, today, incense burning has been relegated to the burning of “joss” sticks at temples, with the rich history and heritage of incense burning being lost or forgotten.

I have purposely decided not to venture into the world of Chinese incense burners in this article simply because that is a whole wonderful world of its own. I have chosen to share just one example – this circa 1840 Chinese Export Silver burner by Tien Shing of Hong Kong. Today they are highly desirable objects sought mainly by Chinese collectors: this particular example was sold in Montreal last year for $2200.

The journey incense has travelled in Chinese culture over the millennia is somewhat akin to a train travelling across many junctions, at each junction slightly changing course. The same might be said for the humble spill vase that, according to where in the world one places it, has a different connotation entirely.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously with WorthPoint

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

S&J Stodel, London; Bonhams, London; Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh + Glasgow; University of California, Los Angeles

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The Cultural Crossovers of Incense 中國出口銀器: 中外文化結合的香 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Longest Tea Party the World’s Ever Seen! PART 1

中國出口銀器: 有史以來最長的茶具之一

My research has long made me aware of the inextricable links between The China Trade period and Chinese Export Silver; without the former, Chinese Export Silver simply would not have existed. Although the official period of the trade with China is 1757-1842, the reality was the trade continued and flourished until the end of the era of sailing ships towards the latter part of the 19th century. – it is also more correct to say it began in 1700 when the “Canton System” evolved. 1842 saw the end of the monopoly of the Chinese hong merchant system in Canton, hence the perception by some historians this spelled the end of the trade as it was formerly known; it didn’t – it just changed the dynamics in favour of the “barbarians”.

China, for hundreds of years, had chosen to adopt an isolationist mentality inasmuch as it refused entry to its interior to foreigners. As far as the Chinese were concerned, China was the Celestial Empire; the centre of the world. All other countries were inferior and considered barbaric. Having eventually compromised by allowing foreign merchants limited and highly controlled access to Shameen Island at Canton, the Chinese name for the merchants was the “fan-qui” [foreign devils/barbarians].

While I say the China Trade was responsible for the phenomenon of Chinese Export Silver, it would be far more correct to say it was the tea trade from China to the West that allowed all the peripheral exports trades to exist; silk, lacquerware, jade, porcelain, ivory, silk and glass painting, furniture and silver wares being the more significant. As the tea trade grew to phenomenal levels, so did most of the peripheral exports; it was only porcelain that began to decline with the rise of the English potteries.

To tell this tale, even in a very concise précis version, I have to create a double-episode article for the first time. It is in reality a story of epic proportions.

The header illustration of this article says it all; the tea clipper Loudoun Castle is unloading at the East India Dock in London on December 8th 1877. Its main cargo is a staggering 40,000 “packages” of China teas amounting to an equally staggering 2 million pounds in weight [900,000 kg]; a “package” being a large wooden tea crate that the older reader will remember as being the packing cases we once used for moving house. We know this not simply from the ship’s manifest, but it was the lead feature article in that day’s London Illustrated News because it had created a record in being the fastest tea clipper to make the journey from Canton to London in eighty eight and a half days. The Loudoun Castle was a contemporary of the famous Cutty Sark, that is now moored in dry dock in historic Greenwich in London.

Cutty Sark’s name derives from the famous poem ‘Tam O’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns. It is about a farmer called Tam who is chased by the scantily-clad witch ‘Nannie’, dressed only in a ‘cutty sark’—an archaic Scottish name for a short nightdress. She was built on the east coast of Scotland, the lion’s share of the many British sailing ships that were built in the 19th century being built in Scottish shipyards. The afore-mentioned Nannie graced the Cutty Sark as the carved wooden masthead.

At the time of Cutty Sark, Scotland’s population was a mere 3.3million, yet it wielded a majority influence among the movers and shakers of The China Trade with merchants and bankers such as William Jardine, James Matheson, Thomas Sutherland and John Hutchison being among the most influential and prominent.

But what has a tea clipper got to do with Chinese Export Silver? The answer is “an awful lot”. The highly decorated tea chests [see above] are obviously rectangular in shape; the hull of a tea clipper does not have straight sides. With the tea chests meticulously stacked within the ship’s hold, the “spare” space at the sides was where all the peripheral export goods were placed. This not only made the shipping space for these goods highly economical but it created and acted as vital ballast for the ship. This, then, is one of the fundamental reasons that made it economically viable to have silver made in China; that and the fact the labour was relatively cheap, the quality of workmanship was extremely high, silver as a raw commodity was cheaper, the manufacturing time was significantly faster and the output was far in excess of the capabilities of most European and American silver manufactories.

From this cross-section drawing above we not only see how much ballast space there was on a large clipper ship, but we can also see how the boxes are clearly stacked with the better quality and more valuable teas placed on the upper rows. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bohea [black tea] was the most popular; the name being an anglicised derivation of the Chinese wuyi. Gradually, as it became the drink of the masses, true connoisseurs took to drinking high quality teas more exotic teas; what was exotic to the British upper classes was commonplace to the Chinese, since they had for centuries highly developed tea palates. In the early 18th century Thomas Twining was selling Pekoe tea, another anglicised-derivative word for an Amoy word for a tea that had white flower properties – bai meaning “white” ho meaning “fine feathers”. Pekoe is now usually used to describe a Sri Lankan tea.

Above we have a remarkable tea chest that somehow survived a shipwreck pre-dating the American Civil War found in the Millecoquins River in Michigan just before it actually became a state. It tells us the importer was F&Co, Foster and Company, the tea it contains is Young Hyson Tea, the Hong merchant in Canton was Hipqua and it is marked box number 9270. It obviously pre-dates the so-called Boston Tea Party of some 40 years later.

Today, the British obsession with tea is the brunt of many a joke, but in the 19th century it was considered inconceivable by the government of the time that the supply of tea could be jeopardised by any Chinese restrictions on trade. We have seen that the tea cargo of just one clipper ship was 40,000 chests. Jardine Matheson alone, the largest China Trade merchant had 19 clipper ships and hundreds of other ships. The British Crown was imposing duty of five shillings per pound [0.45 kg] regardless of the quality, which meant that even the cheapest variety available cost seven shillings per pound – almost a whole week’s wages for a labourer [5 shillings had the spending capacity equivalent to approx. $20 today]. This punitive level of taxation meant that huge profits were available, which gave rise to widespread smuggling to avoid the payment of duty. To profit in the China trade participants had to be ahead of all competition, both legitimate and otherwise. Each year, fast ships from Britain, Europe, and America lay ready at the Chinese ports to load the first of the new season’s teas. The ships raced home with their precious cargoes, each attempting to be the first to reach the consumer markets, thereby obtaining the premium prices offered for the early deliveries. Not only would there have been civil unrest in Britain if tea had been threatened, but the government simply could not afford to lose this lucrative source of taxation revenue.

Applying this knowledge into the context of Chinese Export Silver, we are talking of a huge amount of “ballast space” on ships of which a considerable proportion was taken up with silver. We know that across China there was a network of silver workshops that probably numbered over 10,000 and in addition there were the retail silversmiths, many of whom commissioned the silver items and many of whom were owned or co-owned by hong merchants, foreign merchants or a complicated partnership that could even include the wily compradores.

It was the Portuguese and Dutch traders who first imported tea to Europe, with regular shipments by 1610. Britain was a relative latecomer to the tea trade, as the East India Company did not capitalise on tea’s popularity until the mid-18th century and it was actually the Scottish tea merchants who became the pioneers of tea packaging and marketing – Melrose of Edinburgh dates back to 1812 and still excises today.

Above we have a Chinese Export Silver coffee pot made circa 1670 that is in the Royal Collection in the UK and is to be found today in Queen Victoria’s former private seaside residence on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House. What makes this coffee pot particularly unique is that it was only in 1652 that the first coffee house in London was opened. As with almost all Chinese silver of this period, it does not carry a maker’s mark. The accompanying stand in the picture, although Chinese, is believed not to belong to the pot.

Perversely, it was the London coffee houses that were responsible for introducing tea to England. One of the first coffee house merchants to offer tea was Thomas Garway, who owned an establishment in Exchange Alley in the City of London, at the side of the Stock Exchange. He sold both liquid and dry tea to the public as early as 1657. Three years later he issued a broadsheet advertising tea, touting its virtues as “it maketh the body active and lusty” and “preserving perfect health until extreme old age” as well as “It vanquisheth heavy Dreams, easeth the Brain, and strengtheneth the memory”.

Tea gained popularity quickly in the coffee houses, and by 1700 over 500 coffee houses sold it. This distressed the tavern owners, as tea cut their sales of ale and gin, and it was bad news for the government, who depended upon a steady stream of revenue from taxes on liquor sales. By 1784 tea had became the favoured drink of Britain’s lower classes when William Pitt reduced the tax from a stupendous 119% down to 12.5%. We should also remind ourselves that ale and gin were drunk in vast quantities because the water supply was not reliably drinkable – because tea was made with boiled water, it became a reliable and less inebriating alternative.

King Charles II married the Portuguese Catharine of Branganza in 1662. On coming to England she brought with her a casket of tea and quickly became known as the tea-drinking queen. She took to inviting her friends into her bed chamber to share tea with her. Tea was generally consumed within a lady’s closet or bedchamber and for a mainly female gathering and a tea “equipage” was at that time kept there too rather than in a kitchen or salon. Catharine was known to have favoured using a silver tea pot.

Here is one of the earliest Chinese Export Silver tea pots – it dates to circa 1680 and is of globular hexagonal form on a conforming rim foot. The body has six shaped oval panels cast and chased with a scene, three symbolic of spring with a scholar on a horseback with servant behind in search of plum blossom, crossing a bridge within plum blossom, pine and bamboo with a bird above, all on matted ground, and three alternate panels almost identically cast but with pagoda to the left and fu dogs above, the hexagonal neck and spout cast and chased with birds on floral sprays, the flat chained cover with similar scene within plain hexagonal border and surmounted by a spherical finial with flower spray, the angular handle with later inserted ivory insulators. As with almost all Chinese silver of this period, it carries no maker’s mark; it weighs a very hefty 882gm [28.36 Troy ounces].

From the identical period, we have this Chinese Zhangzhou white ware porcelain tea pot that has had silver mounts added to it which appear to be Chinese also rather than applied by an English silversmith. Zhangzhou ware is also known as Swatow ware; Swatow being the port where porcelain from several counties in Guangdong province was shipped from. This is considered a rather iconic tea pot. It was owned by Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart to become, through marriage, Duchess of Lauderdale and was a huge political supporter of Charles II – highly unusual for a woman at that time. As with Catharine of Braganza, this

teapot lived in splendour in the Duchess’s private closet in Ham House, where it is still to be found today! Note the chain linking the handle to the lid, a common practice employed by Chinese silversmiths of the 17th and 18th centuries. At Ham the Lauderdales created grand suites of apartments with sumptuous furnishings sourced from across Europe and from the Far East. I think one can tell from the portrait below the Duchess was of a somewhat discerning nature.

As we can see from the Duchess’s decorative endeavours at Ham House, China was already a must-have source for any über-wealthy aristocrat who wanted to display that wealth to full effect, after all few aristocrats or even royalty could afford to send agents to China to acquire objets d’art. At the same period we have the previously seen items, quite incredible feats of the art of Chinese silversmithing were appearing in Britain.

Here we have a Chinese Export Silver lidded urn and stand of intricately woven filigree silver and silver gilt, decorated with applied garlands, flowers and foliage. It is attributed to Pao Ying of Canton; almost identical urns have been identified as such. Such decorative pieces were obviously made for a very specific market. We know they existed among Catherine the Great’s collection of Chinese silver just as we know that few Chinese silversmiths were actually capable of creating them due to the highly skilled techniques they required. There is beginning to be a school of thought that the Canton retail silversmith Cutshing may have actually existed prior to the first known recorded date of 1825, however, since 18th century Chinese silver rarely carried a mark, it will be quite difficult to verify. The tea pot below, created at the cusp of the 17th and 18th centuries demonstrates yet again the high level of craftsmanship.

This tea pot [below] carries an engraved inscription on the inside rim “Martha Putland 1753”. It is believed the pot was originally purchased in China by a Colonel Putland at the end of the 17th century.. The pot carries several engraved inscriptions demonstrating the item was passed from generation to generation of the Putland family.

It is at the height of the Georgian era that the tea trade burgeoned considerably and with it we see a noticeable change in style of Chinese Export Silver as well as a tangible increase in the amount of silver coming to England and America. The style tends to favour copying the Georgian neo-classical style and it is clear this is the time when Western merchants now operating in Canton have consolidated considerably, have realised the capabilities of the Chinese silversmiths as well as realised the commercial benefits of having silver made in China. Ballast space is again very much crucial to optimising the viability of this equation.

The style of Chinese Export Silver of this period demonstrates the shift from supplying elitist connoisseurs who were at the forefront of creating fashion to feeding the demand created by the already burgeoning industrialists of the 18th century. The latter were of the new aspiring class who today we would probably classify simply as being nouveau riche, so the style of silver was now best described as elitist-popularist – the late 18th/early 19th century equivalent of “bling”; strictly for the followers of fashion rather than the creators. That said, some of the industrialists, or should we call them entrepreneurs, included Josiah Wedgwood and the largest silver manufacturer of the period, Matthew Boulton [pictured left below] who had established his enormous silver manufactory in Birmingham, England – both of whom were creating fashion for the masses with their porcelain and silver wares.

The shift in gear was changed to focus on supplying the upper middle class, the upper class and the aristocracy. The mass market now existed as did growing prosperity and the Chinese silversmiths were ready to grow with that market. The China tea trade was nearing its peak and the ballast space on the sailing ships had to be filled – and it was!

In Part 2 next week, we shall be exploring the 19th century heyday of Chinese Export Silver, the China tea trade and how by the end of the 19th century change was clearly in the air for both.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously with WorthPoint

Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Royal Collection Trust – Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Birmingham City Council, UK; Bonhams, London; Christie’s, New York; Christie’s, London; Museum of London; National Maritime Museum, London; Harvard Business School Archive; Supershrink’s Storehouse of Silver

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Longest Tea Party the World’s Ever Seen! PART 1 中國出口銀器: 有史以來最長的茶具之一 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Longest Tea Party the World’s Ever Seen! PART 2

中國出口銀器: 有史以來最長的茶具 之二

We continue the story of the inextricable link between the China Tea Trade and Chinese Export Silver with two images that are rather at odds with each other. The picture in the header to this article paints a rather serene and idealistic vision of tea being brought to a junk boat that must be moored at Honam Island, given the 13 Factories buildings on Shameen Island of the foreign merchants are directly opposite. Apart from the highly decorated tea chests, nothing else in this picture reflects the reality of the scenes of chaos that was 19th century Canton. On the right, though, we have the blatant reality – two “coolies” are seen carrying 300 pounds [136 kilos] of tea each. The tea tips or more probably the maocha [roughly processed tea from the countryside] are being carried to be finally processed, prior to being packed into the tea cases for shipping. The long poles were an ingenious design to allow the coolies to “rest” en route.

In the 1840’s, some 19,000 tons of tea were exported from China to the West; by 1886, the total had reached 134,000 tons! This would equate to approximately 75-80 clipper ships, which in turn equates to an awfully large volume of ballast space. Coinciding with the period of 1840-1886, this is the time the volume of Chinese Export Silver and the amount of known makers and retail silversmith mushrooms significantly. It is in this period, 1842 to be exact, the Treaty of Nanking was signed between the Emperor And Queen Victoria, making Canton open to trade with foreigners without the punitive and restrictive Hong merchants. Other treaty ports followed until there was a network around the coast of China, including Hong Kong, which was now British.

It was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1867 that dealt the final death blow to the clipper ships; although clippers could actually be faster than the early steamships, the latter could keep to a schedule without the vagaries of winds and weather that constantly challenged the clippers.

Here we have the steamship SS Thermpolyae that was built in 1896 in Aberdeen to replace its predecessor namesake tea clipper, both having been built at the Hall, Russell & Co Ltd shipyard and owned by the Aberdeen Line.

This gradual conversion to steam-operated ships, although faster, had the drawback of less ballast room than the tea clippers, resulting in a change in the economic equation for shipping the peripheral cargoes to the tea and opium trades.

From the mid-19th century onwards, the upward momentum of the tea trade was reflected in the increased quantity of Chinese Export Silver being produced. But the amount of silver being produced wasn’t the only change – from 1850 onwards we see a whole rash of new retail silversmiths appearing and with them there was a dramatic switch to creating silver wares that were a fusion of Western forms decorated in the high Chinese style.

This early Wang Hing teapot is an excellent example of how the neo-classical had been supplanted by what is essentially a classic shaped teapot that is lavishly decorated with traditional Chinese figural motifs yet still retains a nod to the West with its acanthus leaf base. What is not at first particularly apparent is the superbly executed spout – by inverting the image [right] it is immediately clear that the spout emanates from a stylised dragon head; the irrepressible humour that Chinese silversmiths seemed to have by nature is deliciously expressed in this tongue-in-cheek detailing! This is a teapot one could never tire of using; this is also Wang Hing quality at its very best. Wang Hing was really the first Chinese retail silversmith to successfully combine quality with relatively large-scale manufacturing. It can probably be best compared to the parallel output of Mappin & Webb in Britain and Gorham in America at the same period.

The busy-ness of the decoration of this teapot also sits well with the mid-19th century Victorian love of over-decoration as well as the Chinoiserie’s return to being in vogue. The hankering for all things “oriental” implied travel without needing necessarily to embark on it – the upper middle classes playing at being worldly!

But this transition to the high Chinese style also brought with it the introduction of certain items that were themselves phenomena of Chinese Export Silver. Whereas late 18th and early 19th century items included quintessentially British items such as marrow scoops, fish slices, neo-classical tureens and lidded chafing dishes, the “new breed” of Chinese Export Silver included goblets, scholar boxes, cigarette cases and boxes and matchbox slip covers that were all made so ingeniously Chinese.

Chinese Export Silver goblets were blank canvases that Chinese silversmiths could not only work their magic on with such obvious relish, but they also found highly imaginative ways to incorporate traditional Chinese elements and motifs. The use of triple-stemmed bamboo to support the goblet cup was widely used, yet retained degrees of individuality. In Chinese culture, it is perfectly logical to have bamboo growing from a mound of revealed root system as a support; roots fascinate the Chinese and symbolise not only the vital forces of nature but also longevity. Bamboo is also a metaphor for youth and suppleness; strength and endurance; humility and a pure heart. The combination of bamboo and rocks represents the virtuous qualities of a Confucian gentleman; for the Confucian, bamboo represents integrity. The ingenious combination of allegorical motifs in these goblets could be read like an open book by the Chinese and Westerners who had absorbed sufficient Chinese culture to understand them; leaving the majority of Westerners drawn to them because they were simply exotic oriental objects.

The three goblets pictured above date between 1860-1890 and from left to right are by Cum Shing of Canton, the Cantonese retail silversmith we know as Gothic K and the Shanghai retail silversmith Luen Wo.

Chinese Export Silver goblets became popular as presentation objects for sport events, wedding and christening gifts as well as being popular with the many colonial-style institutional clubs that proliferated in Hong Kong and the treaty ports – the Luen Wo goblet [above right] bears an inscription from the Hankow Customs Club which is probably one of the buildings in the picture below of the Yangtze riverfront section of the foreign settlement area of Hankow, circa 1873.

Chinese Export Silver jardinières appear often in the latter half of the 19th century. The Chinese took the cultivation of plants and flowers very seriously, so the jardinière should not be a particularly strange item for Chinese silversmiths to create. This example below by Wang Hing is again this typical fusion of Chinese decorative motifs applied to a Western form.

Although Chinese cities and large towns tended to appear to the Western eye as being densely built and chaotic, plants always had a place of honour in the most unusual places. Rivers tended to be crowded with all manner of small craft, yet roofs of cabins were often adorned with stunning floral displays while the rest of the boat and often the river itself could be a riot of untidiness.

The scene above is a fairly realistic view of the river in front of the “13 Factories” foreign concession area. The river is a veritable floating bridge of houseboats – it is believed that some hundred thousand Chinese Cantonese lived in this way. We should also note the coolies in the foreground carrying tea chests to be loaded onto small craft which would then deliver them to a clipper waiting downriver. We are lucky to have a painter who depicts Canton nearer to reality than most painters were wont to do. Below we see a very idealised visions of the river bank, probably at Honam Island opposite the scene pictured above. This peaceful idyllic scene is far removed from the hubbub of practically anywhere in Canton, especially near the river.

But plants and Chinese Export Silver were to have an even closer relationship during the tea trade era. While foreigners were not allowed to enter China beyond the foreign trading area of Canton, a rather unexpected yet steady trade went on by British and American horticulturalists coming to Macau and Canton to find exotic plants that were native to China and for once this grew into a two-way trade since the Chinese love of plants had them eager for new species and a willingness to pay handsomely for that privilege. Many of the plants we take for granted have their origins in China; plants such as over 600 examples of rhododendron, azalea, over 150 varieties of primula, lilac, wisteria, chrysanthemum, buddleias, irises, hollyhock, asters, japonica, hydrangea and camellias are just some of the many plants we think of today as belonging to the quintessential English garden. Meanwhile, the Chinese benefitted from enterprising horticulturalists and even some seamen from plants such as the antirrhinum [snapdragon].

Since it was forbidden for foreigners to enter China beyond the confines of the Canton trade area by Imperial decree, we have to wonder how and where botanists were able to find such a divers amount of species and specimens to take home. Some botanist had, with difficulty, set up relationships with Jesuit missionaries that had been allowed into the interior.

This, though, was a limited and often time consuming conduit. It is recorded that a very few Westerners did manage to disguise themselves as Chinese, having first mastered the language, but this was highly dangerous in many respects. However, on Honam Island. The other side of the Pearl River opposite the foreign concession area on tiny Shameen Island, was a huge nursery known as Fa-Tee [flowered lands]. This became the centre of the highly significant and under-heralded trade in horticultural specimens. Botanists and horticulturalists as well as painters who specialised in botanical depiction carved special relationships with the Chinese gardeners at Fa-Tee. Below we have a fine example of the Chinese painter Sun Qua’s work, carried out circa 1830 using gouache on pith paper and clearly demonstrating the elevated place flowers and plants had in Chinese culture.

Those who hadn’t mastered Chinese either used translators or conversed in Pidgin in order to ascertain what specimens might be available from deep in the Chinese interior. It is exactly in this manner that most of the plants we now consider quintessentially British or American came to be with us. At Macau and Hong Kong, botanists were free to roam the hills and collect their own specimens – Hong Kong at this time was simply a series of tiny insignificant fishing villages. One has to wonder if Fa-Tee and the love of gardening was not the inspiration for this 19th century Famille Rose Canton porcelain lattice work bowl.

Shipping plants from China to Britain and America on a sailing ship was anything but easy. Horticulturalists soon discovered that plants could not be shipped unaccompanied and even when they did travel with an expert in attendance, the vagaries of stormy seas, salt water and the dearth of fresh water that sailors were often loathe to share with a plant led to specialised ships being created specially for the purpose of transporting plants. Even portable greenhouses and other ingenious devices were invented [see below] to protect particularly sensitive specimens. But the most astounding fact from this extraordinary trade is that of all the exports that came from China to the West, by far the most profitable, pro rata, was not tea or silver; it was plants.

Astronomical sums were paid by American and British wealthy classes to have rare exotic species in their gardens. It was a mania that was widespread and one we would be hard pressed to find a modern-day equivalent. It was such a specialised trade that it was singular inasmuch as being the only trade where crew were allowed to speculate, find and purchase items of their own choosing in China that they could then ship home free of charge and profit handsomely on their return. Apart from plants themselves, Chinese Export Silver was by far the most popular extra-mural cargo crew members chose to invest in, many of them traveling to China armed with special orders from regular purchasers, some of whom were even retail silversmiths. For this very reason we see a considerable amount of Wang Hing silver marked with the hallmark of George Edward & Sons [see below] of Glasgow; the superior Buchanan Street retail silversmith must have been placing “special orders” with a regular Canton visitor – Glasgow being one of the major British tea ports.

So it is perfectly in order to say that Chinese Export Silver owes its existence specifically to horticulture, both living [plant species] and processed [tea], which would make the bowl [below] by Hung Chong the perfect partnership – Chinese Export Silver and chrysanthemums in the high Chinese style.

Which would make this totally exquisite 19th century Chinese Export Silver spoon probably the most perfect fusion of the best of the China Trade to the West. Made by a rare Canton silversmith we only know as S.M., but a silversmith that displays extraordinary skills of excellence as the detailing of the stem clearly shows.

We leave the tea trade with this superb mid 19th century Chinese Export Silver teapot by the retail silversmith Lee Ching, having a body profusely embossed with scenes from the story of the prodigal son and the return of the cherished son with his father greeting him, exquisitely set off by the twisted faux bamboo spout and handle………

and this equally divine circa 1870 Chinese Export Silver teapot by the incredibly talented silversmith in Tientsin Yong Xing Cheng, desperately trying to be English and Victorian and not quite shaking off its Chinese roots, thankfully, for that is the genius of this piece.

One could say exactly the same about an item of Chinese Export Silver! It has the capacity to transport one through unimaginable adventures of times past.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously with WorthPoint

Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Harvard Business School Archive; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visual Cultures; UK Tea Council; S&J Stodel, London; National Maritime Museum, London; The Royal Horticultural Society Archives, UK; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Hong Kong Museum of Art; Jardine, Matheson & Co., Hong Kong

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

Bibliography: Three Years Wandering in China, Robert Fortune, 1847

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Horse as a Decorative Motif – Revered, Yet a Rarity

中國出口銀器: 以馬為紋飾, 被推祟但罕見

A new year – The Year of the Horse. The seventh Chinese sign of the zodiac, a traditional Chinese decorative motif and theme often seen in the Tang and Yuan Dynasties, yet a rarity in Chinese Export Silver! It’s a mystery I haven’t yet fully got to the bottom of, but the journey the horse has made through the centuries of Chinese art and culture is one well worth travelling on – as with most things Chinese, it is fascinating and a tad complex.

The horse, in the context of China, was not an indigenous animal; in ancient China, the native breed was a much smaller. Back in the Han Dynasty [circa 120 BCE], the Han emperor Wu-ti sent an envoy Zhang Qian [Chang Ch’ien] west to seek out the Da Yuezhi for an alliance against their mutual enemy the Xiongnu. Zhang was captured by the Xiongnu, was forced to stay there for some ten years or so, but was well treated – enough so that he married a Xiongnu woman and had a son. Eventually Zhang left with his family and after many tribulations Zhang did find the Da Yuezhi where he had expected to in the Ili Valley, but found them in Bactria [northern Afghanistan]. They had, however, ceased to be nomadic and had settled down and prospered and as a result refused to cross swords with the Xiongnu again. Zhang Qian stayed with the Da Yuezhi for about a year. He escaped with his family and eventually reached Chang’an, the capital of the Han Dynasty, having been away for some 13 years.

It was in this period away that Zhang Qian visited Fergana [Uzbekistan] and it was here that he came across the fine horses they bred there. Zhang related this to Wu-ti on his return to Chang’an and told him of the horses that were 16 hands high; Wu-ti was so impressed that he referred to the horses as “Celestial Horses”. For people from the Han dynasty heaven was omnipotent, omniscient and could even possess human consciousness, emotions and feelings. By naming the horse ‘celestial horse’, he was endowing it with the personality of heaven – divine power and spirit of exploration of the Celestial Horse God would be a recurring theme in Chinese Art.

Since the campaigns against the Xiongnu demanded vast numbers of war horses with qualities of size, stamina and muscle not possessed by indigenous Chinese breeds, Wu-ti decided to bring those Celestial Horses to the Han court.

Wu-ti’s initial attempt to acquire the Celestial Horses with gold coins was rejected by the king of Fergana and the Han envoy sent for to negotiate was murdered. When the news arrived in Chang’an, Wu-ti was furious and decided to retaliate by force. He appointed Li Guangli to lead the expedition. In 104 BCE, Li Guangli set off to win the horses with 6000 horsemen and thousands of foot soldiers. However they were not able to defeat Fergana and forced to retreat. Li Guangli with only few remaining men waited for reinforcements from Wu-ti. In 102 BC, Wu-ti embarked the second military campaign in an army of 60,000 men, 30,000 horses, 100,000 head of cattle and thousands of donkeys and camels marching out towards Fergana. They reached the capital and successfully besieged it. They returned to China with a great haul of the famous Fergana steeds. Fergana provided them with the best celestial horses as well as 3000 ordinary stallions and mares. Furthermore two celestial horses would be sent every year. The two campaigns had lasted a total of gruelling four years.

Since then the ‘celestial horse’ has been widely bred in China, but not always successfully. Chinese history is peppered with serious failures in horse breeding; it is one of the paradoxes of Chinese history. The Tang was the first ruling dynasty in China with a strong equestrian heritage, making serious attempts to increase both the quantity and the quality of their horses. They established an intricate structure for managing their herds and enacted strict laws governing the treatment of the imperial steeds. However, during the waning years of the Tang Dynasty, their horse management system fell into disarray, eventually leaving a legacy of horse shortages for the Sung Dynasty [960-1279] similar to that encountered at the Tang’s inception. While the horse always had a place in the Chinese cultural hierarchy, they increasingly became status symbols for rich men and court officials after the introduction of the “celestial horse” and by the Tang Dynasty had achieved “celebrity status”.

So we have the new horse order firmly established in China and we know that the horse is widely used and depicted as an essential for any self-respecting aristocrat to have in the after-life, but we have also established it was an import. The same applies to the use of the horse as a decorative motif as does the playing of polo that was introduced to China from Sassania

Here [above] we have an 8th century Tang Dynasty silver and silver gilt flask that imitates the shape and style of the leather flasks carried by the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. As with much of Tang silver work of this time, a definitive Chinese style that we would recognise has yet to evolve and this flask has tangible Sassanian elements in both style and execution, in particular the use of repoussé work in the main decorative motif – in this case the horse. While gracefully maintaining a pose most unnatural to horses, the horse is holding between his teeth a footed wine goblet. Tang texts record horses from the emperor’s vast stables who were trained to dance while holding and occasionally drinking from cups of wine!

The Tang era [618-907 AD] was a time of prosperity and peace. It was also a high point of Chinese culture which is often referred to as China’s “Golden Age”. Chang’an, the Tang capital, was a major crossroad of the Silk Route and the city quickly became a cosmopolitan melting pot of foreign traders and craftsmen who all influenced style. Sassanian merchants almost exclusively ruled the silk trade from Chang’an eastwards. Silver, specifically, was almost exclusively influenced by Sassanian [modern-day Iran] silversmiths, many of whom were Jewish. By the Sung Dynasty [1127-1279 AD] a significant number of Sassanian Jews, many of whom were silversmiths, settled in Kaifeng, creating the first major Jewish settlement in China. At the same time, we see a significant change in style of silver work that we would recognise as being pure Chinese as opposed to a transplanted foreign style. We can see the importance of the horse within Sassanian culture from this 4th century AD horse’s head in silver and silver gilt [below].

The peace and prosperity of the Tang era encouraged a change in view of the role of the horse; it now became fashionable among aristocrats and court officials to ride for pleasure and this was not just confined to men – the Tang era, for the upper echelons of female society, was an age of relative emancipation as we can see in Zhang Xuan’s painting below.

It goes without saying that we cannot leave the Tang era without paying tribute to the almost ubiquitous Tang horse. The seventh century was a time of momentous social change; the new official examination system enabled educated men without family connections to serve as government officials. A new social elite gradually replaced the old aristocracy and the recruitment of gentlemen from the south contributed to the cultural amalgamation that had already begun in the sixth century.

The eighth century heralded the second important epoch in Tang history, achieved largely during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong [712–56], known as minghuang – the ‘Brilliant Monarch’. It is ranked as the classical period of Chinese art and literature, as it set the high standard to which later poets, painters, and sculptors aspired.

Concepts of women’s social rights and social status during the Tang era were notably liberal-minded for the period. However, this was largely reserved for urban women of elite status. The head mistresses of the courtesan houses in the North Hamlet of the capital Chang’an acquired large amounts of wealth and power. Their high-class courtesans, who likely influenced the Japanese geishas, were well respected. These courtesans were known as great singers and poets, supervised banquets and feasts, knew the rules to all the drinking games, and were trained to have the utmost respectable table manners.

It was fashionable for women to be full-figured, with men enjoying the presence of assertive, active women. The foreign horse-riding sport of polo from Persia became a wildly popular trend amongst the Chinese elite, and women often played the sport, as glazed earthenware figurines from the time period portray [above left]. The preferred hairstyle for women was to bunch their hair up like “an elaborate edifice above the forehead,” while affluent ladies wore extravagant head ornaments, combs, pearl necklaces, face powders, and perfumes. A law was passed in 671 which attempted to force women to wear hats with veils again in order to promote decency, but these laws were ignored as some women started wearing caps and even no hats at all, as well as men’s riding clothes and boots, and tight-sleeved bodices.

A type of glazed pottery with the dominant colours of yellow, brown and green was very popular in the Tang Dynasty, later to become known as tri-coloured glazed pottery or Tang Sancai. The Tang tri-coloured glazed pottery is a low-melting glazed pottery. It was made by adding metallic oxides to the coloured glaze and firing the object to create different colours, namely the predominant yellow, brown and green. The chemicals in the glaze change gradually in the firing process, creating a variegated effect with a majestic and elegant artistic attraction. Tri-coloured glazed pottery was usually used as burial objects. Its loose and brittle base and its low waterproofing properties meant it was not as practical as the blue and white porcelain that had already emerged at the time.

The utterly superb pair of Sancai glazed pottery horses [above] demonstrate not only the skill employed in the making but also the highly elaborate saddlery and adornment the Tang lavished on their horses. This particular pair were offered for sale at Sotheby’s, New York and achieved a staggering $4.2million hammer value.

After the Tang Dynasty, the horse remains in Chinese culture but in a far less prominent position. By the late 18th century and the dawn of the Chinese Export Silver period, the horse appears again as a decorative motif but rarely on its own; figural battle scenes and various allegorical depictions have become the rule.

Here we have a profusely decorated circa 1865 scholar’s box by Bao Xing of Canton [as opposed to Bao Xing of Nanjing]. The inclusion in prime position of an elephant [xiang] indicates that this somewhat complex battle scene probably has Buddhist connotations, the horse being very much second fiddle.

This pair of late 19th century champlevé enamel on silver horses [above], while technically not Chinese Export Silver, they are Chinese and of the period and very much reminiscent of the Tang style including how the horses are fitted out.

This late 19th century miniature Chinese Export Silver horse and carriage with driver by Cum Wo is actually not particularly a common sight. While miniatures abound in their thousands, they are mostly of rickshaws and other modes of transport or carrying that require human power.

Generally, though, from the mid 19th century onwards, the horse features as a decorative motif on Chinese Export Silver only as part of a battle scene, as we can see in the milk jug [above] that belongs to a set made by Tu Mao Xing that depicts scenes from the Battle of Yangcheng in 1140AD.

That said, there has to be an exception to the rule. This superb horse racing trophy cup by Wang Hing almost by default has a group of horses as part of the overall decoration.

As you can see, the trophy is dated 1891, presented for the “Union Jack Trophy” that was held at the Peking Race Club and by a strange stroke of fate, here is that very race in 1891!

But for me, the pièce de resistance of the Chinese Export Silver period is this small box by De Xiang that seems to bring back to life the glory of Tang silver in the 19th century. Shaped as a pomegranate, we have a reluctant horse that isn’t too enamoured at the idea of crossing this swiftly flowing river. The use of champlevé enamel work makes this box a true gem – naive yet highly sophisticated in its simplicity.

The horse may have diminished in practical importance in modern China, but its spirit of still runs deeply throughout Chinese art and culture. This is not to say that horses do not constitute a significant presence in China today; it is estimated that the horse population of China exceeds 11 million, or one-sixth of the horses in the world and comprises more than 26 distinct breeds.

So it’s an interesting and at times complex 1800 year journey the horse makes through Chinese culture, beginning in the realms of mythology, at times having super-natural powers and acquiring the use of wings and emerging as a very real and much sought after outward symbol of affluence and position in society as well as an essential accoutrement for the journey in the afterlife. Having embedded itself firmly into the Chinese psyche, the horse seems to make a retreat from the forefront of the Chinese mindset to dwell more as an omnipresent subconscious ideal of Chinese folk history. Ask most Chinese people today and they will tell you the horse is a much loved animal in reality as well as folklore, amply demonstrated by the main street in Singapore’s Chinatown where 1000 giant illuminated horse sculptures are dramatically galloping above the road in honour of the Year of the Horse.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously with WorthPoint

Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

National Archives, UK; Christie’s, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Eloge de l’Art par Alain Truong – http://elogedelart.canalblog.com/; Sotheby’s, New York; The Silk Road Foundation; Sino-Platonic Papers Issue 177

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The Horse as a Decorative Motif; Revered, Yet a Rarity 中國出口銀器: 以馬為紋飾, 被推祟但罕見 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Discovering the New Master Silversmith of Shanghai

中國出口銀器: 發現上海的新銀匠大師

Having researched Chinese Export Silver for well over three years now, I was quick to realise very early on that anything connected with Chinese history and culture is likely to be complex, to say the least. I have since realised that it is probably the only dependable constant!

Shanghai in 1880 was a very different city to the heady cosmopolitan city that was oft-likened to Paris and Berlin just forty years hence. In the engraved picture in the header of this article, we see the elegant and traditional idyll of the Shanghai Tea Gardens as it was twenty years before the end of the 19th century. It is widely believed these tea gardens were the “inspiration” for the “Willow Pattern” we know so well in the West.

The Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842 between the Emperor of China and Queen Victoria, not only ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British but it created five treaty ports, of which Shanghai was one. This was the beginning of Shanghai’s steep upward curve to becoming an international city that did indeed rival Paris and Berlin by the 1920’s. But back in 1880, traditional China was still to be found in abundance, amongst it some extraordinary master silversmiths that could hold their own with the best of the old-school and better-known Cantonese silversmiths. The Treaty of Nanking was also the catalyst that created a marked increase in output of silver making for the Western market as well as a marked change in the style of that silver.

What were to be the last vestiges of traditional China could still be seen in Shanghai as we can see from this photograph of a group of Shanghai merchants taken around 1880. They have obviously prospered from the treaty port status, but we can also sense the other-worldliness of them compared to their Western counterparts.

While the artisan silversmiths were obviously the ones who had honed their individual skills to an extraordinarily high level, within the context of the world of Chinese Export Silver they were very much governed and carefully controlled in what they could and could not create by the retail silversmiths who commissioned the silver. It is the latter that we in the West tend to know by name and it is these we loosely refer to as the “makers” – their silver marks we have come to call “makers’ marks”. At the beginning of the article I used the word “complex”; what we tend to call the makers’ marks are generally the mark of the retail silversmith, the actual artisan maker’s mark is usually accompanying that mark in Chinese characters.

Luen Wo was probably considered the best and among the most successful retail silversmiths in Shanghai. Although not as prolific as its contemporary equivalent in Canton, Wang Hing, the quality was definitely on par. As with all Chinese retail silversmiths, Luen Wo used a bewildering number of artisan silversmiths, but one that stands out in terms of exceptional quality is one Ning Zhao Ji, whose mark appears alongside the Luen Wo mark reasonably frequently, as we can see below.

Ning Zhao Ji’s work is of exceptional quality. His mark appears alongside several retail silversmiths and, unusually, it appears in conjunction with a Western company mark, Taylor & Company, which would immediately indicate that Ning Zhao Ji was a sought after silversmith.

Quite recently I was asked to identify a piece of Chinese Export Silver that had found its way to California. It was a piece of Ning Zhao Ji silver made for Taylor & Company in the form of a reticulated tazza that is both simple and extraordinary, even by Chinese Export Silver standards.

Here we have that very tazza and the silver marks as they appear on the base. Dating from circa 1895, it reaches beyond some of the more predictable boundaries that Chinese Export Silver tends to exist within. There’s a general attention to detailing, from the faux bamboo outer rim to the positioning of the crane bird with the thick bamboo stem and the significance of the detailing of the exposed root system.

Even though the phoenix is considered the king of the birds in Chinese culture, the crane is the top-ranking bird, symbolic of both social status and longevity – the crane is considered to live for centuries according to Chinese mythology.

This tazza, simple as it might appear to an innocent observer, is overflowing with auspicious allegorical messages to the cognoscenti of Chinese visual imagery.

Because the crane is considered the number one bird, it was used as Imperial China’s highest distinction of court status – its inclusion on the badge of an Imperial official’s robes signified the wearer was of the highest possible rank. Often depicted alone, as in this tazza, signifies peerlessness. A lone crane standing upon a rock or a mound represents having attained the highest civil rank and to have achieved it by one’s own efforts.

It is highly likely this tazza contains a rebus that is telling us [or the original recipient] a highly auspicious message. Bamboo, or the Chinese “zhu” is a homophone for “to congratulate”. Bamboo, like the crane, is also symbolic of longevity. So one can safely assume this tazza is congratulating someone on reaching a significant age. The revealed root system of the bamboo is representative of the virtuous qualities of a Confucian gentleman. The thick bamboo stem, because of its hollow centre, is indicative of a pure heart.

This tazza is particularly remarkable not only for its quality and the story its combined decorative treatment can tell, but also for the fact it was made for Taylor & Co. This was a company that in its own way was remarkable; it also allows us to realise how much history and back story a piece of Chinese Export Silver is capable of carrying.

Taylor and Company was created in Tientsin in 1896 as a seemingly unlikely partnership between a Philadelphia man by the name of F.W.Sutterlee and an Austrian Jew by the name of Louis Spitzer who was a British citizen. The two men could be best described as entrepreneurial rogues; Sutterlee was manager of Kern,Sutterlee & Co in Philadelphia, who in January 1896, after the failure of the firm, sold thrice over by means of forged warehouse certificates, the same large stock of wool, then fled with the proceeds to Tientsin! Our Mr Spitzer, had been in trouble with the British police for being in possession of goods known to be stolen and likewise fled to Tientsin – it is unclear if the two sets of malpractice were connected. The two created the firm Taylor & Co in Tientsin and with them was a third man Baker, alias Parker, alias Taylor, who had been the warehouse clerk whose forgery of the certificates enabled Sutterlee to effect his swindle.

The Signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, 6th June 1859 – making Tientsin a treaty port

The two expert swindlers were subsequently joined by a third “expert”, a man called Leonard Etzel who was actually the brother of Spitzer – Etzel went to Hong Kong and Manila and engaged in the rather lucrative trade of selling arms to the Philippine insurgents after the outbreak of war between Spain and the United States in collusion with the American Consul in Singapore. This convoluted story is the stuff of movies but very much the reality of how Taylor & Co were to do business over the next 30 years and thrive as only a movie script could dictate!

So on the surface, Taylor & Co had set themselves up as the Western equivalent of a compradore – agents who negotiated on behalf of foreign firms doing business in the East. Within the context of the China Trade, compradores could become very powerful and immensely wealthy people – in the late 19th century Robert Hotung was chief compradore for Jardine, Matheson & Co and was believed to be the wealthiest man in Hong Kong by the time he was 35.

As for Taylor & Co, they were obviously very skilled at passing strategic brown envelopes under tables as they managed to procure incredibly substantial contracts including entire railroads, orders for warships for the Chinese and were even agents for some of the largest British and American banks and insurance companies in the East. In a Consular Report of the United States Consul General in Tientsin in 1897 there appears: “Messrs. Taylor & Co. have recently established themselves in Shanghai and Tientsin and their partners at this port have already gained a reputation for business integrity and sagacity”. It seems that Taylor & Co. had a way of winning the confidences of Consul Generals!

And the silver? – it was probably a pet love of one of the rogues and it was sold at retail silversmiths in Singapore, Hong Kong and America. I know of no other silver category that can carry such a story, and this is not an isolated instance. What this says about Ning Zhao Ji is best left as a matter of conjecture, but it certainly shows signs of being a convoluted situation that might appeal to a fertile Chinese business mind. We can see that Taylor & Co had established themselves in Shanghai too – the home of Ning Zhao Ji.

Here [above] we have a typical and somewhat traditional late 19th century Chinese Export Silver bowl; typical in terms of the style but it does have exceptional qualities that other makers of similar bowls might lack. The fine hammer work of the planished ground is particularly good and the crispness of the repoussé chrysanthemum bloom and foliate motif make it stand out from the crowd as it were – the close-up image below gives a particularly clear view of the planished finish. Interestingly, this is another example of Ning Zhao Ji’s work for Taylor & Co.

The chrysanthemum is a member of the grouping of plants known as the Four Gentleman [sìjūnzì], Four Princely Plants and the Four Plants of Virtue. The chrysanthemum in combination with the prunus, orchid and bamboo, as is the case on the combined decorative motifs of this bowl, represent the four seasons of the year.

Chinese culture is almost obsessed with order and hierarchy and this results in an equal fascination bordering on the obsessive with numbers, with even numbers being considered yīn, the feminine, as written in the Book of Changes [Yi Jing]. The four seasons is one of the most represented numeric combinations in Chinese art and any grouping of four is considered to be ideal for a balanced depiction.

The tradition of “four” was so powerful and strong in China that even Maoist China acknowledged its importance in its treatise the “Four Olds” [sìjìū] – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. They also instilled the importance of the “Four Kinds of Elements” – landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries and bad elements.

Another superlative example of Ning Zhao Ji’s work is this fine goblet [left], dated for 1884. This is a large goblet made as a presentation trophy for a bowling tournament held in Amoy [Xiamen], another treaty port, in 1884. But as Chinese silver goblets go, this displays a huge attention to detail and the silversmith’s love of his art, having successfully created a fusion between Chinese traditional allegorical motifs and the high Victorian style. The chased dragon artfully entwined around the acanthus stem, the second dragon emerging from the clouds on the base and the copious work of the goblet cup are a testament to Ning Zhao Ji’s mastery not only of his art but also of his creative mind.

This goblet is also a piece of history of the China Trade. As a trophy, it was presented to T.G. Harkness. Thomas George Harkness worked for the Scottish merchant company Boyd & Company in Amoy as their accountant. A Scot from Dumfries in Scotland, Harkness was destined to have an exemplary career in the China Trade, leaving Boyd & Co in 1889 and becoming the chief accountant for the giant of the China Trade, Jardine, Matheson, in Hong Kong.

Jardine, Matheson was a company built by Scottish merchants and Thomas Harkness may well have been known to the Jardine family since Sir William Jardine its co-founder also came from Dumfries and was the 7th Baronet of Applegirth, Dumfriesshire.Thomas Harkness, in later life, returned to Scotland and was appointed a Sheriff of Dumfries .

Here, on the left, we have another example of Ning Zhao Ji’s “art of the goblet” in this 1884 cup also awarded to the very same Thomas Harkness for bowling, this time the place being Takao [in the South West of Taiwan, known as Kaohsiung today].

Boyd & Company were particularly active on Formosa, the former name of today’s Taiwan, where it is recorded as trading in opium and sugar. Boyd & Company were connected with several of the more dubious trades connected with the China Trade period, apart from opium the most odious must have been what was known as “the Coolie trade” – thousands of coolie workers were shipped to California and Australia as they were deemed to have “possessed the best temperament to work long hard hours without complaint”. We know that thousands of Chinese labourers were employed on the building of the Central Pacific Railroad because of their hard working reputation. Which brings is back to our friends, Taylor & Co. – was their sudden high profile involvement in the railroad business anything to do with Boyd & Co given their shared penchant for dubious transactions?

Here [below] we have another example of Ning Zhao Ji’s work for Luen Wo in this rather dramatic photograph frame that surfaced in Leipzig of all places. One could almost be forgiven for thinking this exuberant design might have been opium-induced, but yet again we are presented with an allegorical combination – prunus and bamboo together is known as the “double happiness of bamboo and plum – zhú méi shuāngxĭ”], so here we have a frame designed specifically for a marriage photograph. While this frame does suit the gentleman in the picture, it was certainly not originally destined to be for him even though his flamboyance is well-matched by the frame!

And yet again in collaboration with Luen Wo, we have this simple but fine rose bowl [below] which is rendered particularly unusual by the fretwork treatment to the base frieze which normally one would expect to either be plain or at most be inclined outwards towards the bottom as with the previously illustrated bowl for Taylor & Co.

Lastly, we have this utterly superb large bowl [below] created by Ning Zhao Ji for Luen Wo in the late 19th century – all the signature work we have seen previously is there with the addition of the exceptionally skilful tooling of the areas of the design that represent water. Although governed strictly by the terms of commission briefs, one can see this silversmith’s sense of theatricality and creativity will always shine through. His work is made for the Occident yet it remains quintessentially Chinese and loses none of the subtle sub-plots of allegorical meaning. Ning Zhao Ji successfully walks the tightrope between east and west without losing his balance.

In England, in the 18th century, there was a landscape gardener who created what we now consider to be the most quintessential English landscapes, albeit it in a totally fabricated idealistic way – carefully staged sets of a non-existent idyll. His landscapes were so brilliantly conceived that his obituary read: “Such, however, was the effect of his genius that when he was the happiest man, he will be least remembered; so closely did he copy nature that his works will be mistaken” while Sir Horace Walpole [aka Earl of Orford] wrote of his passing to Lady Ossory “Your dryads must go into black gloves, Madam, their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead!”. We are talking of Capability Brown, his given name being Lancelot Brown. The word “capability” is one that admirably suits Ning Zhao Ji. What fun it would be to have Mr Ning and Mr Brown as dinner guests with possibly Messrs. Spitzer and Sutterlee to add some extra spice and Horace Walpole to appropriately hold court and mix the spices!

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

This article was written to be published simultaneously and exclusively with WorthPoint

Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills. To Jeffrey Herman at Jeffrey Herman Silver Restoration & Conservation, Rhode Island and to Trevor Downes at www.925-1000.com for their help with research into Taylor & Co.

Getty Images; Christie’s, South Kensington, London; Barbara Darracq, California, Pushkin Antiques, London; Danny Cheng, Hong Kong

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

References:

Jardine, Matheson Archive, University of Cambridge Library, UK

Aviva plc Historical Archive for General Accident Insurance, China

The Takao Club Archive, Taiwan

The Correspondence of G.E.Morrison, 1895-1912, Cambridge University Press

United States Consular Reports, 1898; Leland Stanford Junior University Library

The China Directory, 1862

The Edinburgh Gazette, December 2nd, 1918

The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 1911-1937, Marie Claire Bergère, Cambridge University Press

The Turning Point in China’s Compradore System, 1912-1925

The Letters of Horace Walpole: Earl of Orford, Walpole, Horace (1861). Bohn’s English Gentleman’s Library

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – Discovering the New Master Silversmith of Shanghai 中國出口銀器: 發現上海的新銀匠大師 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER GOES HEAVY METAL! 中國出口銀器也玩重金屬!

It would be perfectly logical to expect Chinese Export Silver to be exactly what it says on the can; silver made for the export market in mind. The art of silversmithing is, after all, a very exacting and particular skill. To discover examples of this quite unique silver category that combine other metals, in particular copper, is not only a surprise; it is a rarity. It also beggars the question why would a silversmith working in a country and a city where silver, as a raw material, was available in vast quantities and relatively cheaply. One can only assume, due to the rarity of actually finding such an animal, that it had to be specially commissioned.

This is all highly plausible, but to then produce an item that is not only of outstanding quality but also is creatively a product of genius is both pleasurable and surprising, all things considered.

Here we have a bowl made circa 1890 by a Canton maker we only know as C.L.; sadly this is a maker that to date has not been fully identified. It’s a fairly large bowl, measuring 24cm in diameter and weighing a hefty 1243gm [just under 40 Troy ounces]. The bowl displays uniqueness in several guises; the combination of decorative motifs and the techniques the artisan maker has employed all come together to make this simply an outstanding piece.

The use of copper for the crab’s shell and the fact the crab is trying desperately to climb over the rim and into the bowl is both genius and humorous. The bowl interior is parcel gilded, suggesting it was designed to be used for food or a drinkable liquid. The relatively heavy hammer-work finish is unusual for Chinese Export Silver; it would be more usual to see a finely planished finish.

As we move around the bowl, we discover the crab is in a sea-scape of different seaweeds, some of which are accentuated with copper embellishment, that are skilfully made to appear as if they are growing from the gravel sea bed, represented here by the concave flared base.

Continuing further around the bowl on our journey through this underworld fantasy, we come across another crustacean in the form of a large conch shell nestling among a variant of seaweed.

Completing the journey, we discover yet another specie of weed that has been enhanced with some fine copperwork. This bowl is a delight to have and to hold and one can palpably feel the delight the maker had at being let loose to express both his skill as a silversmith and to allow his obvious sense of humour shine through.

And lastly, we have the CL mark along with the artisan mark of the actual silversmith who worked the piece, Cheong Lam, which leads me to conjecture whether he was the hitherto enigmatic CL. But there remains one mystery; why all this artistry lavished upon a crustacean? Could this bowl have been for the revered and much sought after dà zhá xiè, aka “the hairy mitten crab” [大閘蟹], because as a classic Cantonese dish, it often appears as a golden apparition in a bowl. In modern-day China, the name for this crab is also a colloquial term for a loser on the financial or property market because when the crab is cooked, its claws are tied up, rendering it useless – no connection with this bowl, however! As a species, the crab is somewhat invasive and has somehow managed to become a pest in parts of the River Thames in London and has even infiltrated the subway systems in China.

Both the crab and the conch shell have significance as Chinese cultural symbols. The conch is one of the Eight Buddhist Symbols [bajixiang 八吉祥] and originally is derived from older Hindu belief where it was considered a symbol of royalty. In Buddhist culture it is seen as being a symbol of the pure and true teachings of the Buddha and is also perceived as a symbol of Buddha’s voice and is used to call worshippers to prayer. In ancient times, conch shells were considered of high value, particularly white shells. The crab is representative of harmony.

Next, we find our dear friend Wang Hing, the most prolific of all the retail silversmiths operating in the Chinese Export Silver period of the mid-late 19th century. One would never dream of ever seeing silver and copper together on a Wang Hing piece, yet here we find a set of 6 exquisitely unusual bowls that almost certainly were originally made to be outer containers for glass bowls, given the bases are completely open.

As a creative ensemble, the decorative motifs collectively make unusual bed fellows. A flowing silver-capped lotus rim borders the copper woven basket work that in turn is adorned by applied high relief chrysanthemum blooms and foliage.

Without knowing what the bowls were originally intended for, it is difficult to deconstruct or even determine if there’s a meaning to the combination of decorative motifs here; is this a rebus or pure decorative happenstance.

The most dominant motif here is the chrysanthemum; the gentleman of flowers according to Chinese culture, by dint of them being not as pretty and coquettish as the prunus or peach. The chrysanthemum is symbolic of intellectual accomplishments and in ancient China were used as a good luck symbol for anyone taking the official examination to become the equivalent of a civil servant, which was considered a rung up the social ladder. It is also associated with autumn since it begins to flower in the ninth month – the most auspicious day to pick chrysanthemums is the ninth day of the ninth month [or chrysanthemum moon].

The Chinese have been cultivating chrysanthemums for over 3000 years and are deemed a virtuous occupation for a retired person.

The blooms are believed to resemble the sun and because of this close connection and yang forces, chrysanthemum tea and wine are still believed to be both life sustaining and beneficial to one’s health. There has been a long tradition of superstition that its clean scent prolonged life. It became regarded as the flower of immortality and was admired for the way it knew how to die with dignity and grace.

The lotus is a symbol that has its roots in Buddhism; as with Buddhism, it symbolises harmony and purity as well as summer, longevity, nobility, elegance and curative powers. But whereas many flower combinations have an auspicious meaning within Chinese culture, I know of no relevance to chrysanthemum and lotus together, so I would be happy to say these bowls are simply a decorative coincidence, albeit the use of chrysanthemum as decoration on plates and bowls in China is historically very commonplace.

With the advent of Chinese Export Silver in the late 18th century, China was literally awash with silver. There was no logical reason to combine silver with any other metal, in fact Chinese Export Silver has consistently been made of thicker and heavier gauge silver than any of its Western counterparts; such was availability of it and the relative low cost. But the combining of metals is, historically, a very Chinese trait and once that was finds it root influences to the West in Persia and Sassania.

In general we find silver and silver gilt combination work aplenty during the Tang Dynasty as we can see in this six-lobed segmented lidded box circa 750AD. The bronze and inlaid silver Tang Dynasty horse [below] a much more rare example yet clearly employing a metal combination firmly embedded in Tang culture.

Certainly, we don’t see silver combinations after the Sung Dynasty but the Chinese did acquire a taste for what they perceived as “exotic” combination in their love of ”singsongs”, a love that grew to obsessive levels. Singsongs was the colloquial team for automaton clocks and musical boxes that originally came from English clockmakers; the more outlandish the better. They were pure rococo confections as we can see from this 1766 example by James Cox, who was considered the king of singsong makers.

This automaton was commissioned by the English East India Company in 1766 for presentation to the Emperor of China. Mandarins and flying dragons like the creature perched atop the bouquet of flowers on the top of the double-tiered parasol represent European stereotypes of Chinese culture in the Qianlong era [1736–95]; the Chinese apparently considered them to represent a curious European taste. The case is gold with diamonds and paste jewels set in silver with hanging pearls. The balance wheel and cock is silver set with paste jewels; the dial is white enamel. A bell hidden beneath the lower tier of the parasol sounds the hours and the entire mechanism is propelled by a spring and fusee device housed above the two central wheels; the attendant is dragged along behind. Two more birds were originally fixed on spiral springs attached to the front end of the chariot, and they must have fluttered when the automaton was set in motion.

Were these confections, often bordering on the bizarre, somehow resurrected in the 19th century as the copper and silver objects we’ve seen previously? We shall probably never know, but the combination of humour and the skill certainly are very similar and if the Chinese Export Silver pieces were specifically made for the West, then it was a case of turning the tables.

Or was it a mental recollection of 17th and 18th century Chinese silver filigree worked with gold that became a must-have of European royal houses including Catherine the Great, who had a particular obsession with this Chinese silver-work?

Shi Sou bronze ware inlaid with silver was popular in both the Ming and Qing Dynasties and this, too, could have left a mental footprint in the sub-consciousness of Chinese silversmiths that lay latent until it might spark inspiration to contrast metal with metal. This late Ming vase is a fine example of Shi Sou technique; Shi-sou was a late Ming Dynasty monk who perfected the art of fine silver wire inlay and from him rose a whole school of work in the same style and technique.

So were Wang Hing and CL influenced by the Shi-sou school, Chinese silver filigree work or the flashy gewgaws the 18th century “singsong” brought to China that seemed to appeal to the Imperial court and all its dedicated followers of fashion? Debatable, but possible would be my answer! It was all inspired by the desire for something different.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills. To Wax Antiques, London and a Private Collector, USA for use of images

Thanks: The Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Palace Museum, Forbidden City, Beijing; Museum Speelklok, Utrecht; Kunsthandel Inez Stodel, Amsterdam; Bonhams, London

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive which is managed by Christopher Hunter at www.eleven38photography.co.uk

The post CHINESE EXPORT SILVER GOES HEAVY METAL! 中國出口銀器也玩重金屬 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Catherine the Great Comes to Town!

中國出口銀器: 凱薩琳大帝來了!

Catherine the Great could never be called a simple girl; to do so would be a gross understatement of the reality that was this supremely extrovert empress. Here we see her inaugurating the new Imperial Academy of Art in 1765 at the Shuvalov Palace in St Petersburg; just another day at the office for her Imperial Highness.

Looking at this image, it is a veritable cornucopia of shamelessly pastel fripperies, but Catherine simply embraced this style to the extent where she was not only Empress of all Russia but also of all style. Catherine could quite easily be appointed the patron saint of retail therapy, finding extravagant extensions to her already vast palaces the easiest way

to appropriately house her obsessive acquisitions. The word “minimalism” was not in her vocabulary!

In the picture of her above painted by the Danish artist Vigilius Erichsen, we see Catherine in a dress that is so spectacularly panniered, she can actually lean her left elbow upon it like some rather convenient shelf. The fact we are allowed to see this enlightened despot as she really was in the mirrored profile image and the more idealistic view of how she insisted she looked is particularly interesting – perhaps Catherine had a “special relationship” with Mr Erichsen! But together they give a fairly accurate measure of her abundantly voracious sexual, social and political appetites. But we need to pay particular attention to the Imperial crown that sits upon a satin cushion before the mirror and the rather sumptuous upper part of her costume.!

Comparing the crown and Catherine’s costume with this exquisite pair of Chinese Export Silver and silver gilt lidded urns, we can immediately see what connects them in terms of all being very much a product of the late rococo period; we can also see what attracted Catherine to be driven to amass what must be the ultimate collection of silver filigree objects, much of it from Chinese silversmiths in Canton.

In late 18th century Canton there was one silversmith who particularly gained a reputation as the consummate creator of superb items of filigree in the rococo style; filigree and the rococo were almost born to be together. The silversmith in question is Pao Ying and we know of him operating from Old China Street from circa 1780, which indicates he was probably a retail silversmith who commissioned items from artisan silversmiths firmly under his control. The late 17th century is when we see the very beginnings of the Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period; it is also still a period where much of the silver made in China did not carry any silver mark and Pao Ying is one of the earliest makers to begin adopting this formal identification. Pao Ying’s earliest mark we know of is actually a mark that is simply scratched into the silver [see below left]; incised marks were to follow [below right].

We can see more clearly from the detailing in these urns that the applied decorative motifs are inspired by the dress fashion of the period. It is highly likely the floral and foliate elements were originally embellished with champlevé coloured enamel work.

The background silver wire work is an interesting fusion of what is considered traditional silver filigree work of Jewish silversmiths and the equally traditional Chinese swirling cloud motif yún – an auspicious decorative motif that dates from the Han Dynasty representing both the heavens and linguistic twin brother “good fortune” yùn. Chinese decorative culture has an inherent dislike of blank space and it for this reason Chinese Imperial robes would be encrusted with the swirling cloud motif. We can see the similarity between the filigree cloud treatment and this detail from a Chinese porcelain ginger jar.

The urns, therefore, are an interesting fusion of a Chinese traditional motif meeting a very Western rococo style applied to a neo-classical form that was the style that would supersede very shorty after these urns were likely to have been created.

Here [above] we have a pair of almost identical urns that have been attributed to Pao Ying and dated circa 1800. It is identical work to much of the Chinese Export Silver filigree items that formerly belonged to Catherine the Great and now form part of the largest single collection of Chinese silver filigree in the world to be found at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. This set of five silver gilt caskets [below] formed part of the Empress’s 32 piece toilet set at the Winter Palace.

These stunningly exquisite pair of boxes form part of the same extraordinary set and were used for storing lipsticks and rouges; created as crabs, they sit upon trays that are probably the finest example of Chinese silver filigree. Why crabs? There is a subtle allegorical meaning to these boxes that only someone such as Catherine could fully appreciate. Each crab is holding a sprig of a rice plant; in Chinese culture this combination forms a rebus that symbolises peace and harmony. But a crab is also symbolic of an “iron clad general”.

The pair of silver gilt filigree urns we saw at the beginning of this article are incredibly important pieces; they are rare as a surviving pair and they are rare because they are of the late rococo era and could only have been originally made for a person of standing of that era. Who that person was remains a mystery but the urns are a star lot in the auction being held at Dreweatts on 26th February 2014 in their Fine Silver & Objects of Vertu Sale.

They are also important surviving pieces of the early Chinese Export Silver period and of the China Trade period itself. As such they have huge relevance as items of late 18th century Chinese history.

Historically, most Chinese collectors have shunned Chinese Export Silver that is not overtly Chinese in decorative motifs. It is a trend that is slowly changing as collectors become more aware of the complex and rich history this silver category represents. These urns are examples of the pinnacle of the skill and art of Chinese silversmiths; they are also fine examples of an era where the finest of China was sought by Kings, Queens, Emperors and the Empress of all Empresses, Catherine the Great.

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgments to Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills.

State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Ralph M Chait Galleries, New York

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Catherine the Great Comes to Town! 中國出口銀器: 凱薩琳大帝來了! appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: “CABINET OF CURIOSITIES”

中國出口銀器: 珍奇百寶屋

Sometimes I have to pinch myself; I must be one of the luckiest people on the planet because I get to see so many beautiful objects very single day. I am also lucky that Chinese silversmiths had a wicked sense of humour which they often expressed in the objects they created. Other times I get to see items that are simply staggeringly over the top, while retaining their intrinsic masterful workmanship. Often the items can simply take my breath away. So I felt I should no longer be selfish and that sense of guilt has driven me to share some of the gems.

Here we have the first object; nothing unusual or earth shattering about this item, you’ll be all saying. But this object is very unusual, in fact it is the only example of its kind I’ve ever seen in Chinese Export Silver. It is a “pounce”; used to contain pounce – a fine powder made from powdered cuttlefish bone or very fine pale sand used to dry ink after writing a letter or calligraphy. The word pounce is derived from the Latin for pumice by way of the old French word “ponce”

This particular pounce was made by Tu Mao Xing of Tientsin [Tianjin] towards the end of the 19th century. Obviously a specially commissioned piece, it was very much a product of its time when the high Victorian style had become so overtly eclectic with a resurgence of the Chinoiserie style in Britain as this ink stand below attests. Not Chinese Export Silver but made by George Lambert of London in 1891 in the Chinese style.

The Tu Mao Xing pounce is indubitably decorated with traditional Chinese motifs, but it is interesting to see it carries the meander border which is so often referred to as “Greek Key” which, when used in context with a Chinese object, is somewhat of an oxymoron! Known in Chinese as Huí Wén, it is to be found as far back as the Neolithic age, but it first really comes into its own as a decorative border in the Ming Dynasty. The pattern loosely resembles the Chinese written character [huí], meaning “to return”; the motif itself symbolises rebirth.

We have here a Ming Dynasty silver gilt and bronze censer; the cylindrical body cast in relief and parcel gilded with Immortals accompanied by auspicious animals in a celestial landscape – all set against a diaper repeat background. The Huí Wén borders are inlaid with silver wire – a wonderful example of how styles and motifs became embedded. The evolution of the Chinese Style is fascinating, taking a thousand years to become definitively and recognisably Chinese it remained constant with only some wayward nods to Western culture that were never meant for the Chinese anyway. The Chinese style is like meeting an old friend; you know where you stand with it. There is nothing inconsequential or flippant about the culture of Chinese decorative motifs; everything had a meaning and combinations so often present an entire allegory or rebus. To the Chinese, it is second nature. It is almost a parallel language. What is comforting is that many Chinese today know and understand it; not something we could comfortably say of Western understanding of the symbolism of Post Medieval painting, for example.

Yet again, at first glance this silver filigree box may not seem particularly extraordinary, but after close examination it becomes apparent there is virtually nothing Chinese about this box other than its use of filigree as a technique. The silversmith is very Chinese, Yu Ying is the name and the place of manufacture is Dàlián and it is the combination of the maker and the place that has caused this box to be unusual as an example of Chinese Export Silver, in fact it is the epitome of that silver category.

Dàlián is in Liaoning Province, North East China. Yu Ying was a silver workshop that operated between circa 1905-1925. In 1898 Dàlián was leased from China by Russia and in 1905 the name of this port city was changed to the Russian name Dalny.

The box we see above was made by the Moscow silversmith Vasilij Potsov and it was made in 1869, the style and the particular form of the silver filigree technique is very Russian, as is the Yu Ying casket. The common denominator between the two boxes is the technique of silver filigree; very much an art that Jewish silversmiths have practised for millennia and to be more correct, it was the Mizrachi Jews; Jews that came from ancient Middle Eastern stock such as Persia, formerly Sassania. Sassanian Jews were known to ply the Silk Route from the Han Dynasty [206BC-220AD] up until the 10th century AD when a significant number of Sassanian Jews migrated east and settled in Kaifeng. Many were silversmiths and it is how silver filigree influenced and became assimilated into Chinese silver making until the early 20th century.

Potsov was a Jewish silversmith and the besamim [spice] box we have on the left is known to have been made by a Russian Jewish silversmith in the late 19th century using exactly the same techniques as Potsov and Yu Ying. The spice box is a ritual Jewish object used to celebrate the passing of the Sabbath and the beginning of a new week.

Teapots are so often exemplary examples of the art of silversmithing, but the next Chinese Export Silver item is like a Brueghel painting; the more you look at it, the more one appreciates the happy medium that has been struck here of skill, restraint and love of the art of making.

Made by the Canton retail silversmith Wong Shing* mid 19th century, this is one incredibly special teapot that has found a comfortable fusion of Western form and both classical Chinese and Western decorative motifs. It is highly tactile and very substantial.

The Chinese Mandarin figure finial sits proud and tall atop a mound decorated with songshú [squirrels] in a vine, a traditional allegorical combination that symbolises longevity.

Acanthus caps the elegant scroll handle, a shell and foliate classical border forms the rim of the lid. The baluster body of the pot is exquisitely formed and proportioned with its segmented panels that depict an evolving story of figures in landscapes and gardens; the whole sitting upon luscious feet formed of fu dog heads cunningly emanating from acanthus leaves and set resting upon a single giant clawed foot. It is obvious a highly creative master was in control of this piece. To have an intrinsically classical Western feel while retaining a definitive Chinese flavour is a sign of sheer genius. It flouts several conventions of what a teapot is, yet it works.

We stay with the figural, with the songshu and grapevine and a classic form teapot for the next piece that is as skilful and creative as the Wong Shing piece but from totally different mindsets. Made by Sheng Yuan**, a retail silversmith operating in Peking and Shanghai, it dates to circa 1890.

The tapered canister body is decorated with six hexagonal panels, the central panel depicts three maidens on a balcony watching a group of three travellers, one with a fan and another with a tall parasol. The corresponding panel on the opposite side depicts a scene of a tea ceremony taking place in a garden complete with gazebo and lush foliage.

The panel nearest the faux bamboo scroll handle shows the allegorical combination of the songshu amidst grapes on the vine – not only symbolic of longevity but also of plentiful fruitful issue. The panel nearest the spout depicts a swirling dragon amidst clouds. The faux bamboo stem finial, though fairly typical, is skilfully executed appearing from a cluster of bamboo foliage.

Sheng Yuan traded under the shop banner of “Peking Silver Temple” in English and Sheng Yuan Lou which literally means “The Shop of Sheng Yuan”; we can see this in the commercial directory entry above. We should take a moment to take note of the use of the word “Peiping”. It was in the Ming Dynasty that a garrison was established called “Beiping” where present day Beijing stands; the place having gone through various name changes through successive previous Dynasties. By the 15th century, the garrison had become a large town and the name became “Shuntian” as well as being called Beijing. The construction of the new Imperial residence, The Forbidden City, was completed in 1420. Fast forward to 1928 and the name was changed back to Beiping [written at the time as Peiping]. Beiping fell to Japan in 1937. The name Beijing was restored in 1949 and sadly, in 1960’s much of the ancient city wall was torn down to make way for expansion and the new subway system.

By knowing this, we can date the Sheng Yuan directory entry to circa 1930.

The silver marks on this piece indicate this teapot was probably made in the Peking workshop, but yet again the pure Chinese decorative motifs sit perfectly comfortable with the classic Western form.

Lastly, we have a piece which is so extraordinary inasmuch as it has to be the epitome of Chinese high camp. It is a high Victorian confection in the high Chinese style. It is so deliciously exaggerated that one is prone to wonder whether it could even have been opium induced! This is Chinese style on steroids! Yet, in all its frivolity, there’s a skilfulness that cannot be denied.

It is made by one of the very established retail silversmiths in Canton, Hoaching*** who also had the reputation of being the best purveyor of carved ivory in 19th century Canton. When one studies the pagoda flanked by giant bamboo, it is very reminiscent of carved ivory; it is busy – there rare even two crane birds feeling at home in all this busy-ness.

The piece was intended as a trophy piece. It still retains its original wooden box lined with sumptuous turquoise silk.

It is monstrous and it is loveable. It is a nightmare and it is a dream. It is certainly unforgettable.

http://chinese-export-silver.com/academic-research/

http://chinese-export-silver.com

Adrien von Ferscht’s website is the largest online information resource for Chinese Export Silver: www.chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, UK; Christie’s, South Kensington; Dr Fischer Kunstauktionen, Heilbronn, Germany; Skinners, Boston; Supershrink Storehouse of Silver

*In Fine Silver & Objects of Vertu Sale, February 26th 2014, Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions

** Available at Supershrink Storehouse of Silver

*** Christie’s Interiors Sale, 11 March 2014, Christie’s South Kensington

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: “CABINET OF CURIOSITIES” 中國出口銀器: 珍奇百寶屋 appeared first on chinese export silver.

Since the discovery of Wang Hing & Company by Crosby Forbes in the 1960’s, the name has become synonymous with Chinese Export Silver, yet virtually nothing was known about the company.

This is a historic moment: for the first time in the research of this unique silver category, the true name of the family behind the Wang Hing empire is revealed. A wealthy Canton merchant family they might have been, but they were a family of high principles, avoiding anything to do with the opium trade and insisting on designing and overseeing manufacturing of all silver that bore their mark.

The 1842 Treaty of Nanking became the catalyst for many changes in Canton; not only had a new order had been established in the China Trade itself but Chinese Export Silver went through a rapid metamorphosis. What had been faithful high-quality copies of the neo-classical Georgian style were transformed into overtly traditional Chinese decorative motifs adorning what were essentially classic Western forms.

The Treaty, although ostensibly an agreement between the Daoguang Emperor and Queen Victoria, favoured the British overall, but other nations were beneficiaries by default, in particular America. Post 1842 we also witness a huge increase in the number of retail silversmiths operating in Canton and all the other treaty ports that ensued as well as Peking. To service the retailers, the number of silver workshops mushroomed.

Apart from the tea trade, the other engine that drove this new age of the China Trade was opium; it was, after all, opium that caused the momentum for the stand off with the Chinese that resulted in the Treaty. While all the component trades that comprised the China Trade flourished in their own right after 1842, opium was always in the background. It was not uncommon for retail silversmiths and their compatriots in other trades to be involved in the trade given a significant number of the new retail silversmiths were entrepreneurial merchants by nature.

One retailer that resisted the trade fiercely was Wang Hing & Company; a name that has become synonymous with Chinese Export Silver. As with almost all retail silversmiths, the trading name was a fictitious name chosen for its auspicious invocations and it is because of this that very few of the actual owners’ true names are known to us today. The fact that the Chinese also had an aversion to recording the reality of business transactions in writing also does not exactly help those of us that seek to carry out research.

Wang Hing was probably the most prolific of all the Chinese retail silversmiths in the 19th century, yet the identity of its owner has always remained a mystery. We know, for example, that Hung Chong & Company, a contemporary of Wang Hing, was opened by Fok Ying Chew who later sold the business in 1902 to Sum Luen Sing. We only know this from personal travellers’ journals of the day and editorial in The Chinese Repository. Wang Hing, though, remained an enigma.

Earlier this year I was overjoyed to receive an email completely out of the blue from Hong Kong from a woman who is married to a direct descendant of the family that owned Wang Hing! Many emails and a lot of research later, I have the great pleasure in presenting the story of that family and of the unique insight it has opened up on 19th century Canton and a subsequent move to Hong Kong that came to an abrupt end when Wang Hing & Company was obliterated from the map.

Wang Hing & Company was begun during what must have been a tumultuous time after the signing of the Treaty in 1842 by the Lo family. It was an upper middle class wealthy merchant family who were specialists in trading jade and it was exactly this that Wang Hing first opened its doors as. The Lo family originated from Foshan, then a small town to the west of Canton, but a town already known for its affluent merchant population and by the mid 19th century had become a prosperous merchant family living in Xiguan, an area of the sought after prosperous Liwan district populated with large stylish merchant villas and mansions with the Lizhiwan River close by; the river being the small boundary between Canton and Shameen Island where the Thirteen Factories foreign trading area had relocated to. Sadly we have not yet discovered the name of the original Mr Lo, but the business was taken over by the eldest son, Lo Kit Ping, in the mid-late 1860’s.

The photograph above is the earliest record we have of members of the Lo family, showing Lo Hung Pok in the middle, the third grandson of Lo Kit Ping, Lo Hung Tong on the left who was Hung Pok’s third sibling brother and Lo Hung Fan on the right, the fifth sibling brother. As with many affluent merchant families of the time, there were “at least” fifteen children in the Lo family and they were dressed in the traditional West Gate Canton style.

This is the map of Shameen Island at the time Wang Hing & Company came into being. The “canal” at the northern side is the Lizhiwan River and the bridge across it enters directly to Liwan; the bridge on the east side enters directly to the West Gate of old Canton City. Shameen [Shamian] was leased to the British under the Treaty of Nanking as the foreign trading area which the British then sub let to different nations for their “factory” or, as the Chinese referred to them, “Barbarian Houses”. The term “factory” was used in the China Trade as a remnant of the former Portugese dominance in the trade; the Latin word “factor” means “doer” – a mercantile fiduciary. The factory, therefore, is their office [trading post].

This is Shameen Island [above] shortly after the 1842 treaty signing and development has begun. The bridge across the Lizhiwan River can be seen clearly and the merchant villas are already developing in Xiguan. This all quickly developed and by the 1880’s had become a chaotic, bustling and incredibly prosperous hive of trade as we can see below. The Chinese are true masters of what appears as organised chaos!

The large Lo family lived in a grand merchant house on Duobao Lu street adjacent to the river; merchant houses at that time were a fusion of pseudo-Western style that retained a traditional central courtyard. A very particular Xiguan style developed and the doors, gates and stained glass windows quickly gained a reputation. Even by wealthy Chinese standards, these were considered grand mansions.

The Lo family were not a minority wealthy merchant family, the entire Liwan district comprised of mansions and its own high-end shopping streets and the above interior is typical of a Canton merchant’s house, including the equally typical Manchuria stained glass fretwork windows. Having now had the opportunity to dialogue with the Lo family [which includes a 93 year old young lady living in Guangzhou today] what comes over strongly is that the decision to expand into the silver trade was not taken lightly. It was taken with the conscious decision to design the pieces personally and to oversee the manufacturing process and it was this family pride in maintaining a level of quality that allowed the Wang Hing name to be synonymous with a consistency of quality and style. Wang Hing silver is also almost exclusively in the high Chinese style, which seems to be consistent with the traditional values the family maintained.

Even a small piece such as this reticulated lidded canister with blue glass liner demonstrates an obvious attention to small detail. The fact Wang Hing understood that blue glass would create a far more dramatic effect than the usual clear bubble glass that many Canton silversmiths opted for shows a striving for perfection. Blue glass was not native to China and would either have been produced in Hong Kong or even imported from Bristol in England. This canister displays a comfortable fusion of traditional Chinese decorative motifs and a classic Western form with the subtle addition of the bottom acanthus frieze looking neo-classical at first glance with a hint of the ruyi about it.

The Lo family in Canton were a typical entrepreneurial merchant family, drawing strength from the age-old Chinese tradition of a business or skill being handed down from generation to generation. The social rise from their Foshan roots was a rapid one, not only investing in the Wang Hing venture but they also established and owned what was considered to be the largest and most luxurious movie theatre in Canton in 1932, having over 1500 seats; the Jin Sheng Cinema on En Ning Lu, literally around the corner from the Lo residence. En Ning Lu was the fashionable shopping street of the Liwan community [see right] – Jin Sheng operated as a cinema until 2007, albeit not connected with the Lo family since the Revolution. Surviving family members of that era still remember receiving free tickets for their friends.

In a recent anthropological study carried out by Hong Kong University, it was discovered that almost all of the large theatres in Canton [Guangzhou] had been created by merchant families, many of whom originated from Foshan. As theatres, they were used for staging traditional Chinese opera which was still popular until the 1870’s. With the coming of cinema, many of the theatres were converted and the Jin Sheng was the most luxurious of them all. It throws light upon an interesting equation which demonstrates the merchants had a deep sense of culture which, knowing their trading backgrounds, seems to have presented a means to further profit.

Wang Hing & Company grew from strength to strength and in the early 1920’s it was decided to build a flagship shop in Hong Kong. Zetland House was erected at 10 Queen’s Road, a purpose-built emporium for silverwares, jade, lacquerware and all manner of luxury traditional wares.

It was Lo Hung Tong, one of the three siblings we met before, who ran the emporium and was to be the last Chairman of Wang Hing & Company. Wang Hing also opened a sister emporium in Shanghai to cater to the burgeoning international community there.

Here we have a view down the newly fashionable Queen’s Road around the time of the opening of the Wang Hing store and it was in this atmosphere that Wang Hing flourished and became the destination of choice for the many Western clubs and institutions and the ubiquitous horse racing, tennis and golf clubs that abounded for trophy cups.

This rose bowl carries the Wang Hing mark and is decorated with the traditional dragon chasing the flaming pearl motif. It also carries the following inscription:

Presented by the Imperial Chinese Government to

Capt. A Sharp U.S.N.

in Commemoration of the Visit of the American Fleet to China

Amoy, October 1908

Below we can see the official state luncheon where the bowl was presented. The two gentlemen in the foreground turned towards us are Imperial Manchu Prince Yu Lang and Rear Admiral Seaton Schroeder of the United States Navy. Although this particular occasion was special, the fact that a piece of Chinese Export Silver has the capacity to take one on a journey of social history is not unusual – in point of fact it is extremely common and very much part of the attraction of this silver category.

Not only do we have record of the actually occasion, but we can see the souvenir menus presented to all the attendees – a rather interesting culinary melange!

Here we have Wang Hing & Company at its very best with this superb example of Sino-Victoriana. It is also a superb example of social history of the times and how a retail silversmith in Canton is supplying a major bespoke trophy to the Indian Mercantile Community in Kuala Lumpur.

The inscription reads:

Selangor Races 1893 Mava Cup

Presented by

The Indian Mercantile Community

Won by Romano

Selangor Turf Club

Chinese traditional motifs are highly appropriate adornment for trophies and other commemorative items, since they all have a multitude of representational and auspicious meaning. Chinese dragons, for example, traditionally symbolise potent and auspicious powers, particularly control over water, rainfall, hurricane, and floods. The dragon is also a symbol of power, strength, and good luck. The dragon was symbolic of Imperial power and strength. When combined with traditional Western classical motifs, there is often a recipe for a very powerful combination of symbolism, not to mention a veritable cornucopia of aesthetic delights that Wang Hing seemed to thrive on.

While still overtly Chinese, the decorative motifs do also allude to more localised imagery yet skilfully captured on a Western classical form. The general busy-ness of the decoration is reminiscent of Indian Bhuj silver, highly “colonial” in feeling while still remaining obviously Chinese in origin. This particular trophy recently appeared in auction the America and sold for $38,810. It weighs a hefty 2.4 kilos.

In Hong Kong Wang Hing thrived for almost twenty years, creating and producing a vast amount of Chinese Export Silver. In 1941 disaster suddenly struck with the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and after several bombing raids over an 18 day period when the Zetland House store was destroyed and the Crown Colony was surrendered to the Japanese forces, the Lo family managed to flee back to mainland China. All the company records and the stock was lost forever along with almost all of the family mementoes.

Despite the unfortunate end result, Hong Kong was well-prepared for air raids. A network of underground tunnels was made available to the general public.

The sad moment when the Japanese army staged a victory parade down Queen’s Road in December 1941 after the official surrender by the British. Note the absence of Hong Kong people. The road was renamed Meiji-dori in the new regulation to ban all English and Chinese signage. The renowned Peninsula Hotel became the Matsumoto.

For the Lo family, they were back in mainland China. Both Shanghai and Canton had fallen to the Japanese. According to the Japanese, they did not declare war on China and always referred to the war as “The China incident” – a peculiar phrase given that prior to the invasion the Chinese economy had been at the peak of prosperity and the Japanese immediately strove to reverse that.

A British Shameen Island resident eye-witness wrote after the invasion of Canton: “I rode slowly back to Shameen along familiar streets making a wide detour to see what was happening. It was a sad sight. All shops were closed and shuttered. Everywhere people were madly rushing. There were no vehicles, just people hurrying on foot with what baggage they could carry. There was an atmosphere of fear an anxiety all around me. People were saying that the Japanese had entered the city and that their tanks had driven along the East Bund and up the central Taiping Road. As I rode along streets near this area they were completely deserted and deathly silent – so different from the noisy, crowded streets of two days before.”

Here we see Canton burning, viewed from the bridge at the Shameen British concession area. For the Lo family, it was to be hard times for four years, as it was for the majority of Chinese under occupation. It took the bombing of Hiroshima to force the surrender of Japan. Wang Hing still existed but in name only. We see Admiral Chan Chak accepting the Japanese instrument of surrender in Canton on 3rd September 1945.

The years of unrest in Canton between the departure of the Japanese and the formation of the eventual Peoples’ Republic of China caused the Lo family to disperse. Some returned to Hong Kong, some went to Hangzhou and some stayed in Canton. With the declaration of the Peoples’ Republic, all private companies were nationalised and all the records of private enterprises were seized. This is the day Wang Hing & Company passed into the realms of history, as did many of the retail and manufacturing silversmiths whose names we are now familiar with. Luckily, so much of their production over the 155 years manufacturing period found its way out of China. Luckily, too, we are just beginning to appreciate how special this silver category is.

Lastly, proving that small is beautiful, this circa 1900 cream jug with its matching sugar basin are stunning examples of Wang Hing’s creativity and imagination. The insects are actually stylised wasps [féng] – the allegorical combination of wasps with bamboo has the meaning “May you live in abundance”. Rather than an epitaph, it is a fitting end to a long lost master.

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

http://chinese-export-silver.com

uk.linkedin.com/in/vonferscht/

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, UK; AC Silver, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Skinner Inc, Boston, USA; S&J Stodel, London; Sotheby’s, Paris; Christie’s, South Kensington, London; United States Navy Archive; urbanartantiques.com; Honk Kong Library Archive

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: WANG HING – Discovering the True Identity of a Genius 宏興: 發現一個天才的真正身份 appeared first on chinese export silver.

To many people it will seem incongruous that a 19th century Chinese silversmith in Canton would have created a megillah, but it’s not as strange as it initially appears. Albeit that Chinese megillot are rare, they come with what any megillah has – a long story. But this time it’s not just the scroll contained inside; the Jewish connection with China is long and complex, as is the Jewish connection with silversmithing in China.

Here we have the first example of a megillah made in Canton circa 1860 that carries the marks of the well-known retail silversmith who we sadly only know of today as “Gothic K”; a name that’s stuck over the years because of the font form of the mark.

While my research has not discovered the real identity behind the mark, I have come to believe that the “K” almost certainly doesn’t represent the name of the retail silversmith or artisan maker but it is a symbol, or trademark if you will, that stood for Kanton; the accepted transliteration for the city in the mid 19th century we better know as Canton [Guangzhou]

The scroll case is hexagonal in form and is decorated in alternating prunus and bamboo motifs executed in exquisite blue and green champlevé enamel work against a matted ground topped by a matching dome with berry finial. The handle is fashioned as a bamboo stem; the inner scroll is of parchment and hand written. The overall length is 22cm.

To give it its correct name “Megillat Esther” – the scroll of Esther – is by tradition read at the spring festival of Purim. It is the biblical Book of Esther – the story of the Jewish Queen Esther who was married to the the Persian King Ahasueras, probably better known as Xerxes the Great [in hebrew אֲחַשְׁוֵרשׁ] the story being a rather ironic, yet dramatic tale of how Esther reveals the treachery of Haman against her people to Xerxes that results in deliverance for the Jews from the Persian Empire.

Although rare, most Chinese Export Silver Judaica I have ever seen has always been overtly Chinese in decoration, whereas Chinese Export Silver of the period this particular megillah was made is often faithful copies of Western silver. It is reasonable to deduce that this megillah was either made as a commissioned piece for a Sephardi or Mizrachi Jewish client, probably from Baghdad or Calcutta, or it was made for an affluent Jewish family actually living or trading in China, of which there were quite a few. In the mid 19th century we have the Sassoons, Khadoories, Hardoons, Dangoors and other affluent Jewish merchant families living or trading in Hong Kong or China.

So here we have an item of 19th century Judaica that has a very specific ritual usage yet takes a pure Chinese form and was made in Canton; as I’ve previously mentioned, this isn’t as incongruous as it might appear – in fact, the use of Chinese motifs and cloissoné is both highly relevant and appropriate, albeit the main blue enamel colour used is traditionally Persian, representing lapis lazuli and the celestial sphere.

Yet, here we have another silver gilt megillah of exactly the same period that is uncannily similar in many ways. With an octagonal case engraved with scrolling flowers and foliage, the engraved domed top surmounted by a red stone finial, turned and shaped cylindrical revolving handle almost identical the to the previous megillah, the matching thumb-piece decorated similarly, inscribed on the lower part A.S.D. This is where the plot thickens somewhat; this megillah is unmarked yet through the known provenance we know that the initials A.S.D.stand for Avraham Shalom David [Sassoon]. Although originally from Baghdad, the Sassoons by 1850 were firmly entrenched in Calcutta and were the most prominent and successful Indian merchants working on behalf of the East India Company for the procurement and shipping to China of opium. In fact, by 1850, the Sassoons had their own family members already residing in Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong heading their large offices.

The hand painted pen and black ink and tempera on vellum scroll consists of 5 hand stitched membranes that carry the text of not only the entire Book of Esther but also shows the perceived genealogical lineage of the two male proponents of the story, Mordechai and Haman; Mordechai’s line is traced through Jacob to Abraham while the “villain” Haman flows from the wayward Esau. The illuminated manuscript is attributed to the Jewish scribe Isaac Meir Chayyim Moses Gabbai from Baghdad.

Here we see a family group of the male Sassoons dated 1850; the seated gentleman being Avraham Shalom David Sassoon, His son Elias David is on the far left, Albert [Abdullah] next to him and Sassoon David on the right. David was sent to be based in Canton where he was the first Jewish trader among 24 Parsi Indian rivals.

Silversmithing was an art Jews particularly excelled at for millennia. The work of Jewish silversmiths was highly prized by the Romans and we also know that Sephardi silversmiths were operating in Carthage in the 7th century AD. Sassania had a significant Mizrachi Jewish population, silversmithing and minting being professions Jews were allowed to follow and one where they came to be regarded as highly skilled. Jews also had built up a tradition of being travelling merchants on the Silk Route and the Spice Route, making it highly likely the Sassanian silver that was popular with the Tang dynasty was brought to China by Jewish merchants; some of it also probably made by Jewish silversmiths. Sassania encompasses modern-day Iran and is mentioned in the Book of Esther as Shushan, the then capital.

Here we have a two Tang Dynasty terracotta figures of Jewish merchant travellers; they are particularly interesting figures as they portray Radhanite [רדהנים] Jews. Radhanim were medieval Jewish merchants from the Sassanian area who traded between the Christian and Islamic worlds and who plied not only the Silk Route but also most of the trade routes established by the Roman Empire – a trade network covering much of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of India and China.

The Persian geographer ibn Khordadbeh in his most noted book Kitab al-Masalik wal-Mamalik [Book of Roads and Kingdoms] describes the Radhanim as being sophisticated and multi-lingual. He describes in detail four main trade routes the Radhanim plied, including China and a land east of there he names as Waqwaq, which is believed to have been either Sarandip [Sri Lanka] or one of the Indonesian islands. Ibn Kordadbeh’s writing is contemporary to the Tang Dynasty.

Chinese silver of the Tang dynasty has very particular Persian influences, as we can see below in this circa 8th century silver and silver gilt box. China had no history, per se, of fine metalworking. It therefore had to have been acquired and the Silk Road was how they achieved that. This ever open trading artery brought vast numbers of merchants; it also brought artisans. Some of the merchants were also the artisan, among them were the Sassanian Jewish silvermakers.

It is highly likely the “eclectic” aesthetics of designs that emanate from the Tang period can be put down to the the fact that Chang’an, the Tang capital, became an extremely wealthy and cosmopolitan city, inhabited by Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians and Nestorians. This multi-culturalism was reflected in the objects artisans created and is indicative of how such an introspective nation could at the same time be tolerant to other beliefs and cultures. This introspection acted like a blotting paper, absorbing the best of everywhere and moulding it to something uniquely Chinese.

While this late Sung Dynasty lotus petal-shaped cup above is both decorated and takes a form that we would recognise today as being totally Chinese; the transition to a definitive Chinese style has occurred.

It is also at this time that a significant number of Jews migrate, purchase land in Kaifeng, build a synagogue there and thrive. Stelae found in Kaifeng show the Jews there wrote Hebrew in the Palmyrian style making it highly likely they came from Sassania where there was a long-established Jewish population; a population that had begun to be harassed. It would be reasonable to assume that Jews who regularly traded within China on the Silk Route would have identified Kaifeng as a place where they could relocate to. More importantly, it was a place where they could feasibly thrive; meaning they could ply their various trades – the most prominent trades being silversmithing and cotton cloth.

Jews were also known to have been living in China from the 2^nd century AD after the destruction of the second temple. But the fact the Sassanian Jews had never returned to Jerusalem is evident by the synagogue they built in Kaifeng. It followed exactly the footprint of the first temple – meaning they had no knowledge of the layout of the second temple. The religion they practiced was therefore pre-Hasmonean – a religion quite different from Judaism as we know it today. Pre-Hasmonean Jews did not celebrate the festival of Chanukah because it is related to the destruction of the 2nd temple – a temple the Sassanian Jews had no knowledge of.

The Emperor regarded this form of Judaism as being akin to Confucianism and Kaifeng’s Jews found it easy to adhere to Confucianism since it didn’t require the recognition of a new Messiah or prophet and there was no need to give up the rules of keeping kosher or observing holydays. The Jews were the only non-Sino people that were allowed to intermarry and, most importantly, with the Imperial family and court.

It is reasonable to assume that such a sea-change in the look and feel of silver being produced in the early Song dynasty was caused by a catalyst. It could well be that catalyst was the arrival in Kaifeng of the Jewish Sassanian silversmiths. Those silversmiths and their work would have been recognised by the Court and encouraged and patronised. The Jews in Kaifeng did flourish and they could only have done so from artisan work or trade. We also know from records that the Kaifeng Jews were allowed to intermarry, so apart from actually teaching the art of silversmithing to Chinese artisans intermarrying could also have allowed the “family” skill to be passed to non-Jewish future generations.

The Chinese way is for generations to hand down artisan skills through the family line. The Chinese were adept at accumulating expertise, honing it and excelling at it.

During the early to mid-19th century there was a wave of Jews who either settled in Shanghai or in Hong Kong, understanding the opportunities open to them as a result of the Treaty of Nanking. Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews arrived in China as a result of the Opium War and the subsequent upsurge of trade with Britain. Coming to China from British-controlled places such as Baghdad, Bombay, and Singapore, most of them were merchants and businessmen with British citizenship. Originally from Baghdad, the Sassoon family first shifted their operations eastward to India and then went on to become the first Jews to establish firms and engage in business in Hong Kong [1841] and Shanghai [1845]. In the wake of the Sassoons, other Sephardi merchants originally from Baghdad such as Hardoons and Kadoories came to China to seek their fortunes

As external trade centres open to foreign countries, Hong Kong and Shanghai became their leading bases for business. They soon revealed their commercial talents, taking advantage of their traditional contacts with various British dependencies as well as the favourable geographic location of Shanghai and Hong Kong to develop a thriving import – export trade from which they quickly amassed a vast amount of wealth.

In the years I have been carrying out research into both Chinese Export Silver and the History of the Jews in China – two separate research subjects that cross paths constantly, I have never seen a Chinese Export Silver menorah. Could this have been a throwback to the fact Sassanian Jews probably did not know of the festival of Chanukah given they were pre-Hasmonean Jews and would have been hard-pressed to know of the building of the second temple in Jerusalem, let alone its destruction?

This particular Chinese Export Silver megillah may well be unique and must surely have been produced at the direct request of Ezra Ezekiel Ezra [d. circa 1920] who we know was the great grandfather of the owner who entered this piece into auction in Hong Kong in 2005. The maker is even more surprising; it is Wang Hing!

Ezra Ezekiel Ezra was an Iraqi Sephardic Jew from Baghdad who worked in China in the second half of the nineteenth century as a spice and silk merchant. Several members of the Ezra family were scribes and widely travelled and possibly one of them may have well have supplied the scroll. It is known, through family provenance, this megillah was acquired by Ezra Ezekiel Ezra in the second half of the 19th century. This does not necessarily mean he had commissioned the item; it could well have been made for Jews living in China and is probably a very early Wang Hing piece.

The megillah handle is formed as a bamboo stem, the hexagonal case champlevé enamelled in light green and deep blue with alternate panels of prunus and bamboo foliage, the handle to the scroll with ring pull and two hinged clasps, the domed terminal with crenelated border similar to the “Sassoon” megillah and enamelled with further blue and green foliage and with ball finial. The internal scroll is ink on vellum, written in Sephardic Hebrew square script, vellum 5.5 cm high, text 4.1 cm high, 15 lines per column. The overall length of the case is 17.5cm.

The Ezra and Sassoon families almost by default had to merge at some stage. Flora [Farha] Sassoon married her cousin Solomon Sassoon [son of David] in 1876 at the tender age of 14, she being a descendant of the scribe whose work we have previously seen. Flora, later to become Lady Sassoon, bore three children one of whom, Rachel, married David Ezra of Calcutta, a direct descendant of Ezra Ezekiel Ezra.

A rather indomitable character, Flora led a colourful life in Calcutta and emerged as a successful businesswoman in England as well as being a famed philanthropist, hostess and Jewish scholar. She spoke English, French, German, Hebrew, Aramaic and Hindustani. She and her immediate family remained loyal to the religious traditions of her family and although well-travelled, always did so akin with her a minyan – her own quorum of ten Jewish males so prayers could be said. She also travelled with her own personal shochet [ritual slaughterer] so she could uphold the kosher laws.

Although rarely found, any Chinese Export Silver Judaica I have ever seen has always been overtly Chinese in decoration, whereas Chinese Export Silver items of the period these particular megillot were made are often faithful copies of Western silver. It is reasonable to deduce that this megillah was either made as a commissioned piece for a Sephardi Jewish client, probably in Calcutta, or it was made for an affluent Jewish family actually living or trading in China, of which there were quite a few. In the mid 19th century we have Sassoons, Khadoories, Hardoons, Dangoors and other affluent Jewish merchant families living or trading in China.

The story of Purim and the Sassoon daily could well be even closer connected. The capital of Xerxes’ empire was Shushan or Susa. Shushan in Hebrew is שושן. Sassoon in Hebrew is ששון. It is highly conceivable the Sassoons originated from Susa where both stories began.

Interestingly, Sabbath candlesticks by various Chinese Export Silver makers have been recorded, but more interesting is the fact Wang Hing made Sabbath candlesticks in the high Chinese style which were then retailed at Edwards & Son in Glasgow at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Glasgow and Edinburgh at that time had significant Jewish communities.

That said, here we have an example of an extremely rare Chinese Export Silver besamim spice box [above] by the Canton maker M.K. circa 1875. A fully articulated box in the traditional form of a carp. The fish form of a besamim box is believed to be more an Ashkenazi tradition rather then a Sephardi, in fact it probably has its roots in Eastern European Hasidic tradition.

The great meal on a Saturday night [motzei Shabbat] is a particularly Eastern European Hasidic tradition where the menfolk gather at the Rabbi’s home and eat from his table, striving to partake in the remnants. If the Rabbi so much as touched a fish, the leftovers would have been considered remnants because the Torah says “all the fish of the sea – they are given unto your hand” [Genesis 9.2]. This feast, bidding farewell to the Sabbath Queen, could last for hours into the small hours of the morning.

The spice box is a ritual object used in the Havdalah [literally: separation] ceremony at the closing of the Sabbath when three stars are visible in the night sky, in order to mark a distinction between the departing holy day and the incoming ordinary week. The spices are symbolic and are meant to invoke a sweet week ahead and are redolent of the Sabbath itself. Spices generally used are cloves, cinnamon, baharat or bay.

At the end of the ceremony, everyone present says in unison a wish for a good week:

It goes without saying that almost all Chinese Export Silver Judaica must have been specially commissioned.

The article header image is “A Purim Party, Shanghai, 1910”, courtesy of Yad Va’Shem, Jerusalem

The “Purim Greetings” image is from the 1940’s Jewish War Bond – courtesy of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University of California [part of the Alvin I Fine papers collection, 1848-1962.

References:

“The Chinese Jews”, Oliver Bainbridge, National Geographic Magazine, 1907

“Jewish Communities in Asia”, Asia Society

“Jewish Diaspora in China”, Xu Xin

“The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture and Religion” Xu Xin, 2003

“Mind to Meme: Uncovering the Origins of Shared Consciousness Between Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism”, Gilah Yelin Hirsch, 2004

“Early Mapping of South East Asia”, Thomas Suarez

http://universityofglasgow.academia.edu/AdrienvonFerscht

http://chinese-export-silver.com

uk.linkedin.com/in/vonferscht/

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, UK; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Christie’s, London; Sotheby’s, New York; Christie’s, Hong Kong; Cultural-China.com; Jewish Women Archive,USA; Sloans & Kenyon, Chevy Chase, USA; Dangoor Foundation, UK; The Jewish Magazine; The Jerusalem Post Archive; Shanghai Xinhong Cultural Development Co. Ltd; Long River Foreign Exchange Foundation; Yad Va’shem, Jerusalem

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: A VERY CHINESE PURIM SPIEL 非常中國式的普珥節話劇 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Huge Influence of the Early 20th Century Chinese Department Stores

中國出口銀器: 二十世紀初中國百貨公司業的巨大影響

Department stores were first introduced to China in the late 19th century but they came in the guise of foreign chains or investors who were doing nothing more than trying to establish lucrative colonial implants that had previously appeared on the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere in south east Asia. In Shanghai, the first stores were Hall & Holtz and Whiteaway Laidlaw & Company; both sorely underestimated the Chinese mindset and found they were only able to relate to the minority foreign foreign community and the then relatively marginal affluent Chinese.

The whole concept of the department store is the absolute antithesis of Confucian culture; a culture that holds a disdain for merchants and commerce and a culture that was firmly embedded in the Chinese psyche. While Chinese merchants had certainly been successful in the 19th century as a result of the Chinese having an almost default gene that allows them to naturally be one step ahead, that gene was kept private and subjugated because Chinese society had not changed its mindset significantly for almost 2000 years. Merchants, as a result, had to remain subdued and almost apologetic for any commercial successes they managed to attain.

The names of Chinese silversmiths we today might be familiar would fall into this category because they were all retail silversmiths and often general luxury goods merchants. There is no Western comparable to this phenomenon and even though 21st century China may have moved onto a virtually different planet, the same Confucian tenets remain, albeit they have now been subdued and confined to the realms of the sub-conscious.

Up until the early 20th century, Chinese merchants were subjected to special taxation, licensing fees, travel and trade restrictions. Commercial law was rarely codified, leaving the merchants at the mercy of the system that didn’t favour them. Five years after the formation of the Republic, a commercial revolution was set to take place and it could only happen because of Chinese merchants that had left China in the 19th century to make their way and their fortune in Australia. Bearing the psychological burden Confucian dogma imposed upon them, these Chinese émigrés used the clan-based network that had been already established in Australia to overcome both the psychological and practical barriers. Their individual and collective experiences abroad transformed them into modern merchants capable of taking highly calculated risks; they were bold and they were broad-minded.

In 1897, Kwok [Guo] Lok had created the Wing On fruit store Australia. In 1901, at the age of 16, Guo Shun had boarded a boat in Hong Kong bound for Australia. Guo Shun was born in 1885 in Zhuxiuyuan Village in Guangdong Province. He was the sixth in the family. The oldest brother came to Australia in 1882 but died not long after his arrival. Guo Le, the second brother, arrived in Australia when he was eighteen. The second brother went to work in a vegetable garden and later became a hawker, selling vegetables door to door. Later, he joined several fellow-villagers from Xiangshan County in founding the Wing On Fruit Store in Sydney. The store also handled money deposits and so attracted a great deal of capital. It was the second brother, Guo Le, who invited his youngest brother Guo Shun to come to Australia in 1901.

Shortly after he arrived in Sydney, Guo Shun went to work as an apprentice in a firm run by another Xiangshanese County resident, to learn all about modern business. Three years later, he left his fellow townsmen’s company to join his brother at the Wing On Fruit Store. His elder brother, Guo Le, soon left Sydney for Hong Kong where he started up another branch of the business. Guo Shun then took charge of the family’s Wing On Fruit Store in Sydney.

At that time, the Australian government legislated that only Chinese immigrants who came to Australia before 1901 had the right to permanent residence. This restriction caused great difficulties for Chinese businessmen. As Guo Shun had already become established in Australia, he helped new-comers to resolve the problem of residency and to start their own businesses.

The Wing On Company was created by the Guo [Kwok] brothers. This successful venture was followed by an unsuccessful foray into shipping, plying the route between Australia and Hong Kong. But Hong Kong was to prove the start of their real success when they opened an emporium there, or department store as they liked to call it, in 1907 which can be seen in the above picture at its first premises on Des Voeux Road. It was later to make a successful entry into banking, their prior Australian experience of taking money deposits being the expertise they drew on.

At first, Wing On sold mainly imported goods such as French cosmetics, British woollens, Bohemian glassware, and Swiss watches. When a widespread campaign was launched to advocate buying Chinese goods, Wing On opened up new sources of homemade goods by creating their own workshops and processing factories. Engaging well-known technicians and skilled workers at high wages, Wing On now shifted to self-production and self-marketing, and soon made a name for selling own-brand goods. They also gave financial aid to a number of small and medium-sized factories and workshops so they could become Wing On’s special manufacturers – this is exactly how Wing On Chinese Export Silver came into being, the kettle and stand below being typical of the early Wing On silver production.

The benefit of hindsight clearly demonstrates how it was necessary for the latent Chinese entrepreneur to gain foreign experience and to do so within the safety of the Chinese clan structure – in fact, it would be more correct to say Cantonese clan structure. It was only thus that the shackles of the ingrained passive mentality of the traditional Chinese merchant mind could be jettisoned in order to overcome the institutional barriers of Imperial China. The importance of the clan structure cannot be emphasised enough; it is based on regional ties known as jiguan – a perceived place of origin that become all the more pronounced and effective when moved to a new place.

It is this very Cantonese clan-based network that made it possible for the Kwok brothers and the eventual owners of what were to become known as the “Big Four” department stores in China to gain sufficient experience and sharply re-focused business instincts in order to return to Hong Kong and China to raise capital and establish their businesses.

Back in China, for centuries merchants and artisans had worked within so-called guilds; in Canton alone, there were some 70 or so guilds. But these were not guilds in the Western sense, they were a more localised loose structure within which an alliance of like-minded merchants or artisans of a particular skill could collectively retaliate against the ever-present government pressures. The force that was created by these alliances was further bolstered by the clan factor – it became an invisible glue, if you will, that created a very strong bond; a survival system, if you will. This guild-like structure was known as tongxiang hui and it acted and behaved very much in the Western masonic manner but without the ritual element. If one word could encapsulate this phenomenon, it would be “solidarity”.

In 1918, Wing On completed its transition from its Sydney fruit store chrysalis and opened its huge purpose-built flagship store on Nanking Road in Shanghai.

Hong Kong was a necessary stepping stone to mainland China for a truly successful attempt at finally establishing what was to become a very definitive Chinese take on the department store concept. Hong Kong had already become a middle-ground of the Chinese/Western culture clash.

As a modern department store, Wing On had adopted the “fixed price” policy; a concept that was so totally alien to the traditional practice of hard bargaining. But one year before Wing On had opened in Shanghai, what was to become its arch rival, The Sincere Company had opened its flagship on Nanking Road.

Sincere had pre-dated Wing On in opening in Hong Kong by seven years. It had opened on Queens Road in relatively modest premises [above] in 1900 by Ma Ying Piu, also originally a Cantonese who had returned from Australia who had taken the model of the Sydney stores, Anthony Horden & Sons and the David Jones store as templates to create a workable Chinese version in Hong Kong. The Sincere Company quickly outgrew its original Queens Road building [above] and moved into its grand new premises on Des Voeux Road, Central [below].

It was Sincere that served as the guinea pig and it was Wing On that was to watch and take note of the problems and mistakes that Ma Ying Piu was to make in those early years. Sincere created its own trademark based on its Chinese name Xian Shi [right] which proved a successful innovation and is still used to this day. Less successful was Sincere’s early attempts to introduce female shop assistants which had to be terminated in dismissal, including Ma’s own wife and sister-in-law. Ma was successful in adopting lavish window displays that were devoted to one specific category of merchandise; a totally foreign concept to the “pile it high and never price anything” concept the Chinese were used to.

Ma was determined to gather highly skilled artisan craftsmen to produce own-brand quality merchandise in his own workshops for his own stores and silver featured quite high in that plan. What both Ma and the Kwoks were doing was to democratise shopping for the middle class while building into that democratisation a way of retaining the important element of the aspirational needs of that class. In silver production, this manifested in what was at the time an innovational blend of “middle of the road” silver items of quality with an “aspirational” range of quality items that equalled the best of many of the independent Chinese Export Silver retailers such as Wang Hing.

A Sincere cake slice [above] could sit perfectly comfortable with the Sincere reticulated comport that in both quality and detailing is of a higher level, yet is still slightly subdued in its “safeness”.

Appealing to both the more aspirational middle class Chinese customer and the foreign resident or tourist, this pair of lobed vases carry the Sincere Xian Shi mark as well as dated inscriptions for 1925. While they are of high quality manufacture, they do display a degree of “bland democracy” one would expect in silver from any good department store around the world in the mid 1920’s.

Yet this slightly earlier creamer and sugar bowl by Sincere still retain an attention to detail, silver techniques and the gauge of silver employed and would sit comfortably alongside contemporary pieces from Wang Hing or Sing Fat, both quality retail silversmiths.

In 1917, Sincere opened its Shanghai flagship store [below] one year before the Wing On store opened its doors on Nanking Road.

The scene was set – two arch rivals whose owning families had almost identically parallel stories that came to rest opposite each other on Shanghai’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue, Nanking Road; Wing On on the left hand side and Sincere Company on the right [see below].

Not only were the family stories and the department store buildings parallel, but so was the silver production of both houses. This Wing On circa 1920 tea set is what one would expect as aspirational middle class merchandise and would be on par with similar own-brand high quality department store silver around the world; Selfridge & Co in London and Harrods both sold silver bearing their own hallmark as did the prestigious Hong Kong store Lane Crawford have its own silver mark.

The same can be said of this Wing On tea set – good quality, “safe” merchandise having the added caché of the Wing On silver mark and a dash of panache with the raffia woven handle and the overall finely planished finish.

The fact Sincere and Wing On vied each other from opposite corner seems to have also infiltrated their silver workshops. This Wing On lidded butter dish could easily be from the same “range” as the previously illustrated Sincere cake slice – same decorative motif, same silver techniques……

……… both techniques that were carried through into this contemporary Wing On jewellery box.

The third department store to make the leap from Hong Kong to Shanghai was the Sun Sun [XinXin] Company, which had established itself in 1912 and opened its Nanking Road store in 1926 [below left]. Liu Xiji and Li Minzhou, both Cantonese who had been successful in Australia, were the power behind the throne of Sun Sun.

The last of the “Big Four” to open in Shanghai was Daxin or The Sun Company [above right]. Unlike Sincere and Wing On, both Sun Sun and The Sun Company chose to either import goods or have them made in China – neither operated their own workshops and neither manufactured their own ranges of Chinese Export Silver. The Sun Company, however, was the first Shanghai department to successfully introduce female sales staff; a move the other three quickly adopted and did so in their own style.

The jiguan clan structure remained prevalent at the core of all four companies; as they expanded, extra partners were introduced who were either family members or people that were longtime friends from their original towns or counties.

The Kwok family at Wing On believed strongly in character building of their staff through moral and intellectual education. They established a Department of Intellectual Cultivation [zhiyu bu] and organised night classes for teaching English as well as a drama group and musical ensemble. A Department of Physical Education encouraged the martial arts as well as swimming and football. Swimming became so popular among the staff that the Kwoks organised its own buses to take them after work to the North Point indoor swimming pool.

As we can see from the silver of Wing On and Sincere, they developed “safe” ranges that were repeatable lines. In doing so, they had consciously created a middle ground between traditional Chinese and Western tastes so that one single range would appeal to both the fast-growing middle class Chinese as well as the equally expanding number of foreign residents; both probably felt more secure and comfortable in the department store environment rather than brave one of the Nanking Road or Queens Road Chinese emporia such as Wang Hing or Hung Chong. Yet, in their own way, both Sincere and Wing On had an influence on some of the silver the traditional retail silversmiths created. While we don’t know exactly what prompted Wang Hing to establish in Hong Kong, the success of the Hong Kong pioneer department stores most probably were at least part of the equation. Certainly, Wang Hing & Company did add what they probably considered “a more commercial” selection of silver when their Hong Kong Queen’s Road store opened, their core high quality bespoke business was still their mainstay.

This Wang Hing tea set corresponds approximately to the same date as the previously illustrated Wing On set. While this is by no means a bespoke Wang Hing piece, it is certainly of superior quality in terms of attention to detailing and quality of workmanship. Yet both this set and the Wing On set would have been considered their diffusion range – the dependable stock items that would be the bedrock of each store or department.

Compare the previous set with this Wang Hing set of some 25-30 years earlier. We can see the evolution brought about by the combination of modernity and, probably, commercial mindedness, with an intent to remain both traditional and a house of quality. How much of that latter evolution can be laid at the doors of Wing On and Sincere, we can only surmise.

As for the jiguan effect; The Wing On Company today still has a dominant Kwok family presence and the Ma family still own The Sincere Company. The Kwok family are now Hong Kong’s 2nd wealthiest dynastic family. Had Wang Hing & Company in Hong Kong not been decimated by the Japanese invasion, it, too, would probably still be thriving and run by the Luo family.

The jiguan effect is as relevant today as it was at the beginning of the 20th century and as it has been for many centuries. It is an invisible glue that is virtually impenetrable by an “outsider”

[Left: Ma Ying Piu on the left and Guo Le to his right]

http://chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, UK; AC Silver, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Vantage Shanghai Magazine; Shanghai History Museum; International Centre for Chinese Heritage & Archaeology; La Trobe University Archive, Victoria, Australia; Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, UK; Shanghai Municipal Council

REFERENCES:

Asian Department Stores, Kerry L MacPherson

Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, John Fitzgerald

Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of Urban Culture in China, Leo Ou Fan Lee

Shanghai: Its Urbanization and Culture, Xuanmeng Yu & Xirong He

Department Stores in Early 20th Century Shanghai, Brendan Sternquist & Yan Ma, Michigan State University

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The Huge Influence of the Early 20th Century Chinese Department Stores 中國出口銀器: 二十世紀初中國百貨公司業的巨大影響 appeared first on chinese export silver.

The 1842 Treaty of Nanking broke the habit of a lifetime; after over 2500 years, China could no longer be the closely guarded introspective nation it had been, but even with the enforced opening of the fortress-like doors the treaty was in reality more of a fissure rather the hoped-for wide open gateway that was expected by the British.

China, by nature, had always been an inventive nation. It has a default gene that has always allowed it to absorb the very best of the outside world and either make it something uniquely Chinese or incorporate it as a component part. Since the Han Dynasty [206BCE-220CE], the Silk Route, the only open highway in and out of China, attracted foreign merchants, many of whom had artisan skills which they readily shared with the Chinese. The Silk Route acted as an extremely effective blotting paper of skills the Chinese did not inherently have. The “blots” that remained were quickly adapted to the benefit of the Chinese. Obversely, although the Chinese grew to become a highly resourceful nation, most of the inventions stayed within the confines of China and never filtered out; quite the opposite of the European Renaissance.

By the Sung Dynasty, the capital Chang’an [Xi’an] had become the first truly cosmopolitan multi-cultural world city of one million souls compared with 800,000 in Baghdad and 40,000 in London at the same period. It became a hotbed of trade – it became a hotbed of invention; Chang’an was the 12th century equivalent of Silicon Valley and equally one can say that Silicon Valley can be likened to 12th century Chang’an. How so? Both act and acted as magnets for the ingathering of new technologies and where expertise that was not necessarily home-grown was welcomed. Chang’an was a gateway where ingenuity could become a profitable commodity. Where Silicon Valley has become a metonym for 21st century innovation, we would not be amiss to assume Chang’an was the 12th century equivalent.

Chang’an, was also known as the “land of abundance”. By the time of the Han, Shu brocade had become an important export for China along what was known as the Southern Silk Road; the route leading to the Middle/Near East.

It is important, though, to always have in mind this “melting pot” phenomenon that was Chang’an when looking back through history. This typically Sung era brocade [above] does not have pure Chinese origins. One of the most potent “outside” influences upon what we today would regard as a Chinese style was Sassania; one of the seven great monarchies of the ancient Eastern world, Sassanian merchants were considered to be one of the most active on the Silk Route. These merchants were also highly entrepreneurial and their distinct influences on all forms of Chinese decorative arts are plain to see, gradually becoming integral to an eventual definitive Chinese style. They achieved this by finding ways to share their expertise in various decorative manufacturing techniques that were at the time superior to those in China, finding ways to do so that were profitable to both the Sassanians and the Chinese; in short, there appears to have always been an ulterior motive to sharing.

This is a Sassanian silk twill textile [above] that is contemporary to the previous Chang’an brocade. It depicts the simurgh; a Sassanian mythical flying beast that was adopted as the Sassanian royal symbol that finds its etymological roots in the eagle. This emblem and silk cloth is to be found even in Andaluz culture where the Sassanian influences were also felt.

While sericulture is intrinsically of Chinese origins, Sassanian merchants imported the raw silk along the Silk Route where it was then dyed and woven into twills and brocades. This slightly later, but nevertheless Sung Dynasty era, child’s silk jacket [below] is in the Sassanian style.

But what the entrepreneurial Sassanians did was to then export finished textiles back along the Silk Route, much of it ending its journey in China; what the English would call “selling coals to Newcastle”! We are witnessing how skills became a transportable commodity and how the borders begin to become blurred on the origin of skills, materials and decorative motifs.

There is no doubt about the fact that Chinese silver making was greatly influenced by the Sassanians, both in terms of the technique of silver making itself and the decorative motifs used.

This silver gilt cup [above] is Chinese, straddling the Sung and Tang dynastic periods. While there are some recognisably Chinese decorative motifs, the overwhelming influences are still veering more towards the Sassania. But the important fact of this particular object is that it was made in China and the silver technique is clearly influenced by Sassania; this expertise would have been “offloaded” almost without doubt in Chang’an. This is a clear indication of expertise entering and then staying in China and gradually becoming Chinese.

An example of this is amply shown in this Chinese Export Silver eight lobed bowl with parcel gilded interior by Wang Hing dated 1896 that displays many elements of the Tang and Sung Dynasties, particularly in terms of the form of the bowl as reflected in the eight lobed footed Tang parcel gilt and silver bowl below left and the Sassanian lobed bowl below right.

This absorption of expertise and technique was almost exclusively a one-way phenomenon. Rarely did the countless technological innovations and discoveries that occurred in China, particularly during the Sung Dynasty which is generally regarded as the Chinese renaissance, find their way outside of China. What these discoveries did do, however, was to firmly imbed a high level of capability that was to be put to use with the coming of the Qing Dynasty in the 17th century to produce ceramics, lacquerware and silver specifically for export, much of it either in the style of its end destination or in a style that mirrored an idealistic perception of what was thought to be Chinese by the West. The ability of Chinese artisans to create high quality items across a spectrum of media for specific foreign end-users is quite remarkable and is one that drew on the ingrained skills that had originally been assimilated from outside of China. This is probably due to the fact the Manchu rulers created two very strong foundations of its legitimacy; the bolstering of the bureaucratic institutions and, more importantly, the neo-Confucian culture from previous dynasties – a re-tuned, updated version the Manchu felt was more appropriate to its aims. The “Sacred Edict” [Sheng yu] of 1670 effectively exalted Confucian family values. Fifty years later the Shengyu guanxun “Amplified Instructions on the Sacred Edict” were issued in order to make the original edict far easier to understand. These precepts held firm into the 20th century and the republic period and are still ver much in the sub-conscious minds of the Chinese today.

This Kangxi [late/end 17th century] blue and white porcelain dinner plate [above] was made specifically for export to the West and demonstrates that “copying” Western ceramics had already begun; this particular example is believed to be a copy of either Dutch or English Delft.

Whereas this 17th century Ming Dynasty blue and white porcelain plate [above] is pure Chinese – or is it? Firstly, this is an example of what is known as “transitional ware” – the crossover period from an old style to a new “modern” style. But back-tracking several centuries, the technique of cobalt decoration can be traced back to Sassania, the raw materials were later exported to China where by the 14th century mass production of fine, translucent porcelain had begun in Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China to this day. From the 16th century, local sources of cobalt were used in China, but Persian cobalt was always considered the best and remained the most expensive.

China found itself in a new age; an age where royal and aristocratic households around the world understood the quality of Chinese porcelain which in turn fuelled a mania for vast armorial dinner services that Jingdezhen produced in equally vast quantities. The Chinese master painters were supplied with samples of the armorial crests and coats of arms; a more totally foreign concept could not have been presented to them, but they created these fantasy “Chinese” landscapes and motifs on porcelain in the hundreds of thousands. But it was not just the quality that fuelled the fad – it was a combination of the burgeoning China Trade and the ships that now plied the routes, with the added attraction of the relative cheapness of these high quality items.

The Chinese had turned full circle, having assimilated the expertise and made it uniquely Chinese they had combined this with the centuries old Confucian principles that were the bedrock of the Chinese work ethic; 17th century export marketing was born.

This 18th century Chinese porcelain dinner plate [above] was produced in Jindezhen in 1743 and decorated in Canton as part of a 206-piece dinner service commissioned to be presented to Commodore George Anson by the Canton Cohong [Guild of Chinese Merchants] in gratitude for the assistance given by the crew of Anson’s ship HMS Centurion in extinguishing a great fire that destroyed much of the Foreign Factories area of Canton. The service accompanied Anson back to his family seat at Shugborough, Staffordshire in England. The design in enamel and gold leaf includes seascape panels on the rims, together with a griffin’s head and the Anson coat of arms. The central design features a breadfruit tree with symbols of love including doves and a cupids bow and quiver. On the rear is a rope and anchor motif. Interestingly a single plate features a different design with a gold leaf pattern on its rims, and the breadfruit tree not in bloom. The breadfruit tree was of special significance to the Centurion’s crew as it provided them with sustenance on Tinian Island in the Pacific when they were suffering from scurvy.

Centurion in extinguishing a great fire that destroyed much of the Foreign Factories area of Canton. The service accompanied Anson back to his family seat at Shugborough, Staffordshire in England. The design in enamel and gold leaf includes seascape panels on the rims, together with a griffin’s head and the Anson coat of arms. The central design features a breadfruit tree with symbols of love including doves and a cupids bow and quiver. On the rear is a rope and anchor motif. Interestingly a single plate features a different design with a gold leaf pattern on its rims, and the breadfruit tree not in bloom. The breadfruit tree was of special significance to the Centurion’s crew as it provided them with sustenance on Tinian Island in the Pacific when they were suffering from scurvy.

Shugborough was just 40 miles away from where Josiah Wedgwood [below] would build his new porcelain factory at Burslem just 16 years later. Staffordshire was the heart of the English pottery industry and Josiah Wedgwood was determined to conquer the enigma that was Chinese porcelain. In 1700 a Jesuit missionary in China discovered the secret of “China-clay” at Kau Ling; China-clay became known as Kaolin in the West as a result and various forms of porcelain and chinaware were developed in France, Germany and Cornwall in England. Wedgwood was obsessed with finding the best Kaolin and did so by sending his agent Thomas Griffith to Cherokee country in North Carolina to secure samples, quickly followed by an order of 6 tons that was shipped to Staffordshire. In the 1770’s Josiah Wedgwood, thanks to Cherokee Kaoilin, patented the process called “encaustic ornamentation”; Jasper ware and Josiah Wedgwood & Company never looked back. Wedgwood achieved all this and much more with one wooden leg and his latter-life blindness; the Chinese remained his inspiration. The great Sèvres factory created their own glazed copy of Jasperware and Meissen created its version known as “Wedgwoodarbeit”. Josiah was also the grandfather of Charles Darwin, the creator of the theory of evolution.

Josiah Wedgwood had taken a scientific approach to creating English porcelain, but one has to wonder whether he also had a default Chinese gene given his entrepreneurial skills and energy were the very parallel of his Chinese counterparts. He, like the Chinese, had a natural propensity for entrepreneurialism. He, as with the Chinese, understood how to create products that were specifically geared for overseas markets.

In 1773, Wedgwood received an order for a 952-piece dinner service from Catherine the Great having three years previously made a creamware tea set for King George III and Queen Charlotte which he immediately branded and thereafter sold as “Queen’s Ware”. Royal households across Europe followed suit. Catherine the Great’s service, now known as the “Frog Service” was to display scenes from English estates, requiring some 1224 illustrations. The service [see below] was to be used at a “minor” country house of the Empress called Chesme Palace – an estate she never visited and a service she never ever used. Chesme Palace stood on the site of a “frog marsh” which gave the set its emblem.

At the same time Wedgwood was supplying the dinner service, the Canton silversmith Pao Ying was busy supplying an endless stream of highly intricate silver and silver gilt filigree gewgaws decorated with exquisite champlevé enamel work and inset semi precious stones and pearls; the tray in the form of a leaf [below], forms part of a 36-piece toilet set that once graced the Winter Palace. The jade encrusted lid of the small casket displays a plethora of Chinese decorative motifs yet redolent of many a Fabergé bejewelled piece.

The Wedgwood Frog Service and the Chinese Export Silver filigree pieces were all promotional items the makers knew would open the floodgates for orders of the dedicated followers of all things “à la mode” – and that is exactly what happened. They were the ultimate PR ploy.

For the Chinese silversmiths, having started with royalty, the only way was down. The minor royals and the aristocracy understood the importance of quality and if that could be secured at a highly attractive price, it was a win-win situation. The exoticism of having silver grace one’s table that could be said to have come from Canton had the capacity to both inflate egos of the owners and enflame jealousies amongst the beholders. As long as The China Trade could endure in all its guises, the demand for Chinese Export Silver could only spiral upwards on its drip-down meander through the strata of Western society; that very journey making it yet another must-have for the rapidly growing upwardly mobile classes of the new 19th century.

By now, the foreign merchants and the Chinese Cohong had got to grips with each others’ needs and, with this new level of understanding and the realisation of the growing demand for the luxury accoutrements that affluence demanded of Westerners, the Chinese silversmiths in Canton were confronted with a relatively new phenomenon; merchants, ships’ captains and sailors all brought silver with them from Britain and America to faithfully copy. The silver was in the neo-classical Georgian style and totally anomalous to Chinese culture and the art of Chinese silversmiths, yet almost overnight the Canton workshops were creating Georgian-style silver worthy of sitting beside the very best British and American master silversmiths. To achieve this, the Chinese did not even try to understand the culture that sat behind such silver – they simply were highly skilled mimics of silver wares.

There is absolutely nothing Chinese about this circa 1790 lidded sugar basin [above left] in the neo-classical style by the Canton silversmith Linchong, the circa 1810 Bao Ying soup ladle or the Cutshing lidded entree dish [below] circa 1840.

The eventual Treaty of Nanking in 1842 not only opened the flood gates for the British to trade without many of the previous impositions the Emperor saw as being appropriate but it also created an outpouring of silver decorated with Chinese motifs – earlier works being motifs applied to what were essentially neo-classical forms, morphing later into a full-blown high Chinese style. This was not by happenstance or the whim of the Chinese silversmiths but a fashion in Britain that quickly spread to America and Europe for all things Chinese, or at least how the Western mind perceived “Chinese” as a style, the signing of the Treaty being the catalyst that created the fashion.

The speedy transformation can bee seen from the neo classical in the circa 1840 Khecheong lidded cup on the left to the circa 1850 Cutshing stemmed goblet in the centre – a classical form embellished with subtle engraved Chinese decorative motifs. Lastly, the circa 1860 Cutshing goblet on the right has completed the transition to the high Chinese style in a space of 20 years.

What is interesting about mid-late 19th century Chinese Export Silver in the high Chinese style is that despite the fact it was highly unlikely the end-user would have any understanding of Chinese culture, the silversmiths still created objects that were teeming with allegorical Chinese decorative motifs. This circa 1890 tea set [above] and accompanying tray by the retail silversmith Luen Wo is covered in messages that would be obvious to a Chinese person yet to a Westerner would probably be nothing more than a highly exotic oriental conversation piece that would imply worldliness and a much-travelled person without the need to leave one of the newly fashionable middle class London, Manchester, Boston or New York suburbs. This circa 1900 lady’s dressing table set by Wang Hing is playing the same trick.

Chinese Export Silver was the most productive silver manufacturing period in the 1400 year history of Chinese silver making. It demonstrates the acute sense of adaptability by the silversmiths to understand its market totally. At the same time as Wang Hing & Company produced the dressing table set [above] for the European or American market, it was equally able to create this rosewater sprinkler for the Indian sub-continent or the Middle East.

Whatever the style and whenever one might choose in the China Trade period, the silversmiths’ quality did not falter and they were drawing on centuries of expertise that had originally come from outside of China, becoming assimilated and moulded into something uniquely Chinese. While for much of the China Trade period Canton was the name synonymous with both the trade itself and silver making, silver workshops existed across China in their thousands. We only become familiar with some of them as the treaty ports spread, not forgetting the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony. While some Shanghai and Tientsin makers might display some subtle localised traits in their silver style, almost all had this enigmatic quality to mimic silver redolent of a nation they would never ever see.

History repeats itself time and time again and we see it now in China being the manufactory of the world. Twenty years ago we would not have dreamt that something exacting as an iPad could be made in China to a British design for a highly demanding Californian company just as in 1800 one would not have naturally dreamt of having a silver tea service made in Canton in the high Georgian style. As it is, both happened and the rigorous standards that were demanded were met.

As the master, Confucius, said: “Consider your job of prime importance; put the reward in second place – wouldn’t this be excellence in its exalted form” or as Albert Einstein said “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

http://chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

References:

Asia Textile Journey, Diane Gaffney

A Dictionary of Symbols, Juan Eduardo Cirlot

Encyclopedia Iranica

Gotheborg.com, Jan Erik Nilsson

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum New York

Studies in Chinese Ceramics, Cheng Tek’un, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong

Language & Ideology in the Sacred Edict; Victor Mair, University of California Press

http://archive.org/details/sacrededictconta00kangrich

Izdanie Imperatorskoi Arkheologicheskoi Kommissii ko dniu piatidesiatiletiia eia deiatel’nosti, St Petersburg

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, The Wedgwood Museum, UK; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam’ Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek; Supershrinks Storehouse of Silver; Seattle Art Museum; Charles E Merrill Trust; Eloge de l’Art, Alain Truong; Christie’s, New York

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The 19th Century Phenomenon Equivalent to the iPad! 中國出口銀器: 十九世紀的相等於今天萍果平版的現像 appeared first on chinese export silver.

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There are more similarities between the port cities of Glasgow and Canton in the early 19th century than one might think, apart from the obvious fact they were both thriving port cities where the very existence of each city was inextricably linked to the port.

By the 17th century, both Canton and Glasgow had highly sophisticated systems of guilds for the various merchants, trades and craftsmen. In Canton, the Qing government had become more open to “foreign trade” – the Portuguese based in nearby Macau, the Spanish from the Philippines, Arabs from the Near and Middle East and Jews, Muslims and Parsis from India had all become established in the landscape when the English and French began to trade with the onset of the Canton System. These were soon followed by the Ostend General India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the Danish Asiatic Company and the Swedish East India Company that was heavily constituted by Scots Jacobites’ business houses – the “refugee” supporters of the House of Stuart. In Glasgow, the eventual de-silting of the River Clyde allowed larger ocean-going ships to dock further up river and the historic Broomielaw ferry point [named after the Brumelaw Croft, a stretch of land running along the north bank of the Clyde] was transformed into a bustling dockside quay and it, too, was a cosmopolitan cityscape of people striving to make their way and their fortune.

Both Canton and Glasgow served as ports for both the entry of goods from overseas as well as goods being exported, with both being dependent on particular imports without which the entire economy of each city would collapse. In Canton it was spice goods, opium, cotton and silver bullion, while in Glasgow the city had a virtual monopoly on the tobacco and sugar imports from the West Indies and Americas. Glasgow was also to be one of the largest receivers of tea from China as well as opium, which we must remember was considered as a necessary medicinal drug that superseded the importation of dried rhubarb in terms of necessity which also came in vast quantities from China – neither being regulated in any way at the time and both being over-consumed through a lack of understanding and pure obsession.

The ties with the cities did not end there though. While the Scots Jacobite connection with Canton has been mentioned, Scottish merchants from Scotland were at the forefront of the “foreign” trade within the Canton System, many of whom were permanently based in the small area allocated to foreign merchants outside of the walled city at Canton – an area not dissimilar to Broomielaw.

By the 18th century, the sailing vessel known as the East Indiaman [above] was the preferred ship plying the Calcutta-Canton-Glasgow trade route. While they could carry a large load, they were heavy and cumbersome, required a large crew and were not particularly speedy. By the middle third of the 19th century, speed had become an essential part of the China Trade and a new ship, the “China Clipper” [also known as “tea clippers” and “opium clippers’] was to supersede the East Indiamen. Many of these vessels were built in Scottish shipyards, with a significant number being built in Glasgow along the Clyde – the TAITSING pictured below is one such ship, here seen entering Hong Kong harbour in 1877.

The China Clippers were also far more efficient in terms of the load they could carry and the manner in which the ship could be loaded. Ballast areas created by the space between the interior layer of the outer skin of the ship and the straight sides of tea chests were where “ballast cargoes” could be stashed; these cargoes being Chinese Export Silver, lacquerware, silks and other luxury goods items.

So the areas denoted by the “pebble” areas in the cross section diagram above could, theoretically, be substituted by peripheral cargoes. With tea being the main purpose of the ship and the voyage itself, the economies of the voyage were calculated on the carrying of that main cargo, which made the economics of shipping the peripheral cargoes highly attractive and the goods themselves became potentially highly profitable as a result. We must take all this in the context of one single China Clipper could carry 40,000 tea chests.

Applying these facts into the context of Chinese Export Silver, we are talking of a huge amount of “ballast space” on ships of which a significant proportion was taken up with silver. We know that across China there was a network of silver workshops that probably numbered over 10,000 and in addition there were the retail silversmiths, many of whom commissioned the silver items and many of whom were owned or co-owned by hong merchants, foreign merchants or a complicated partnership that could even include the wily compradores. The sea captains and even crew members optimised the time they were forced to wait in Canton for favourable trade winds to return with cargo were known to have created lucrative relationships with some of the retail silversmiths in Old and New China Streets in Canton where the drinking establishments that were a favourite haunt of sailors were also situated. Some of the ships would be plying the Canton-Glasgow route and captains and crew could place special orders with specific silversmiths in Canton on behalf of private clients in Glasgow – a welcome supplementary source of income for the sailors.

The tea trade became a very Glasgow-centric trade. Tea warehouses and wholesale tea and sugar merchants sprang up in the area around the Broomielaw. Here [below] we see the tea warehouse of J & A Ferguson on the corner of Trongate and

New Wynd, circa 1872, but the building had been built in 1827 by the tea and sugar merchant William McEwan, Sons & Co who occupied the premises until 1855, selling it on to Fergusons. In the first quarter of the 19th century, over 100 tea merchants are recorded as existing in the relatively small area of Glasgow between Broomielaw quay and the ancient High Street/Trongate areas.

Thomas Lipton was born in the Gorbals in 1850, an area diagonally opposite the Broomielaw quay on the south side of the Clyde. The Liptons, a family of Irish immigrants from County Fermanagh, had already established a grocery store on Crown Street in the Gorbals. Thomas worked in the store where he learned the trade and in 1876, having spent 5 years in America, he returned to Glasgow and opened his first store on Stobcross Street. By 1882 he had shops in four Scottish cities and Leeds. By 1890 he was opening a new shop every week. He soon had over 300 shops and was a multi-millionaire. In 1880 Lipton invested in the stockyards in Omaha, Nebraska; that original investment was reinvested in creating the Lipton tea brand in America which was targeted at the hitherto untapped poor working class market. The brand still exists today.

At the time Lipton family was establishing their original Gorbals grocery store, George Edward, a Glasgow silversmith, had opened his first retail shop and workshop, George Edward & Sons, in 1838.

In 1874 a branch was opened in London by the Mansion House at No. 19 Poultry. George Edward developed a fascination with the “oriental” style and while there is no recorded evidence of his ever having travelled to China, his fascination grew to an obsession which could only have been fuelled by seeing wares sea captains and crew brought to Glasgow from Canton.

By the time the renamed Edward & Sons had relocated to new, much grander premises at 92 Buchanan Street in Glasgow [see below], the retail silversmith held a regular stock of Chinese Export Silver, in particular from the Canton and Hong Kong retail silversmith Wang Hing, as well as other items of silver and wares from China, Japan and Burma. By now, Edward & Sons were holders of a royal warrant to both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, as we can see over the two entrance doors to the retail premises.

In 1888 Glasgow hosted the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry in an ambitious conglomeration of purpose-built buildings in the West End of Glasgow at Kelvingrove Park. All of the buildings were intended to be temporary and earned the nickname “Baghdad”, which may be readily understood from the illustration below.

It was here that Edward & Sons chose to exhibit, with an emphasis on Chinese Export Silver and Japanese silver. Edward & Sons regularly stocked Wang Hing items in both London and Glasgow, and it seems right to assume the goods arrived via Glasgow since they all carried an additional Edward & Sons Glasgow hallmark. Edward & Sons also used hallmarks registered in Chester and Birmingham, but never in conjunction with Wang Hing pieces.

This Chinese Export Silver reticulated large shallow dish by Wang Hing carries the Glasgow hallmark of Edward & Sons [George Edward & David Edward] with the date mark for 1900. It is also a slightly unusual mark for Wang Hing, even though Chinese Export Silver marks normally lacked any semblance of uniformity. Where one would normally expect to see the number stamp 90, which was Wang Hing’s almost constant purity level, here we have the rather strange number 96 stamped.

This rather unusual Wang Hing rose bowl takes the form of lobed lotus petals resting upon three dragons that sit upon an intricately carved wooden stand that has obviously been made for the bowl. A secondary Glasgow mark for Edward & Sons accompanies the mark for Wang Hing and dates the piece at 1905.

The high relief work bowl illustrated below is again by Wang Hing and is also an interesting item inasmuch as it has been used as a Scottish presentation piece. Carrying an inscription around the base plinth “GOOD COMPANIONS OF BALNACRAIG”, the bowl also carried the Glasgow mark of Edward & Sons dated for 1898.

Lewis Farquharson Innes [1730-1830] of Balnacraig was born in the old castle at Balmoral and later sold Balmoral to Lord Fife, who in turn sold it on to Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consort.

Lastly and somewhat appropriately given Glasgow’s affinity with the tea trade, this reticulated Wang Hing tea caddy is ornately decorated with writhing dragons and small rocaille handles and a final in the same style atop the domed lid of bands of prunus and dragon motifs. Again it carries the additional Glasgow mark of Edward and Sons that dates the item to 1898.

Yet again, the Wang Hing mark diverts away from its normal .90 purity mark for .95. While there are instances of other Wang Hing marks alluding to .95 purity, one is left wondering whether Edward & Sons had a particular specification for items ordered from Wang Hing to appear to be above the Sterling silver benchmark. It is feasible, given there was no assay system in China and no legal requirement to record manufacture of silver items.

In 1928 Edward & Sons was sold to the London department store Harrods and later it was amalgamated with Mappin & Webb in 1968 which is when the Glasgow store, which had by then relocated to St Vincent Street, closed for good – 28 years after Wang Hing & Company had ceased to exist.

18th Century English Glazed Pottery Opium Jar

The China Trade was the end result of a highly complex series of commercial transacting that was carried out by merchants from various countries that took advantage of political situations that were in the main created by crises promulgated by trade imbalances. It was fuelled by a combination of entrepreneurialism, greed and personal relationship and it operated almost exclusively underneath the radar of the Imperial Court and the individual governments of each participating merchant nation. The trade in the more peripheral Chinese goods could never have existed without the existence of the two main exports; tea and opium. Although opium was not a specifically Chinese commodity, most of it passed through Canton en route for the West. Both tea and opium were used to obsessive levels – by 1897, in Britain some 80 million cups of tea were drunk each day and Laudanum was widely used as a non-prescription drug until the early 20th century! Laudanum, unlike the opium that

19th Century British Opium Street Seller

was smoked in China, was a tincture that was approximately 10% opium that was mixed with rhubarb and other ingredients such as nutmeg. It was so readily available that itinerant sellers plied the streets of British cities in the 19th century [left]. We also have to remember that the opium trade existed as a direct result of the size of the tea trade. Great wealth was accumulated which in turn and in part fuelled the need for the peripheral trade items.

The Scottish merchant company who dominated the opium trade to Britain by way of Glasgow was Jardine Matheson.

The China Trade, in the latter half of the 19th century seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut. The Canton Cohong merchants were a tightly operating fraternity, but they could not operate without interaction with foreign merchants. Equally, the Scottish merchants were operating as a tight cartel and this like-mindedness of the Scots and the Chinese worked not only on the same wavelength but also as a well-oiled intuitive machine. The merchant forces behind Glasgow as a city in the 19th century had so many similarities to the organised chaos that was Canton. The reason is hard to pinpoint – it may have been that both were geographically remote from the seat of governmental power; that in conjunction with the clannish second nature of both the Scots and the Chinese made for an insuppressible force.

Company of Scotland Flag 1828

A much forgotten fact is the historical existence of trade with Scottish merchants with India and China that finds its roots in the 17th century, pre-dating the existence of the English East India Company as a joint-stock company. The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies [aka The Scottish Darien Company] was created by an act of parliament in 1695; The East India Company existed as a joint-stock company from 1705. Although the Scottish enterprise was a catastrophic financial failure that cost Scotland almost one quarter of its entire liquid assets, what it did achieve was to give Scottish merchants experience and understanding of the potentials that existed as well as the hurdles that required overcoming. Luckily, for the Scots, the ratification of the Act of Union in 1707 included a clause where the debts incurred were agreed to be covered by the new joint government.

The shock of the failure of the Company of Scotland came as a wake-up call and the lessons that had been learned in conjunction with the diminutive size of Scotland, its lack of financial resources and a navy and the Act of Union all coincided to give Scottish entrepreneurs the privilege of accessing the East India Company which they had previously been barred from. Scots also benefitted from the money from the “Equivalent” feature of the Act – money that sweetened the bitter pill of the loss of sovereignty.

Within Scotland, more banks appeared in order to look after the new sources of money from the Act. Savings, deposit and cheque schemes were created – the Bank of Scotland having been founded in 1695. The Scottish gentry and merchant classes had a new-found protection and the next stage of their “evolution” in becoming world-class entrepreneurs was establishing a Scottish elite in London that added to the already established elite that had followed the Scottish monarch James VI to London when he became James I of England. By the end of the 17th century, Scottish gentry and a new middle layer of Scottish society that were trained professionals formed an extraordinarily large proportion of London society in relation to the small size of Scotland to England.

By 1706, the sea routes to India, China and the Spice Islands had been opened up for some time, but the Scots had surreptitiously become involved and ensconced in situ in the various trades, in particularly the “Country Trade” – the name given to the coastal trade with India.

The Scottish officers were recruited in vast numbers into the East India Company military branch. The Scots were there because the Whig government had begun using East India patronage to maintain political control of Scotland. Only the abundance of “favours” granted the East India Company by Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, in collusion with the East India Company director John Drummond, a Scot! Government connection with the Company continued to favour offering Scots positions in the Company in exchange for electoral and political support. This resulted in Scots forming a disproportionate number of the elite of the Company and, most importantly, allowed Scots to be effective free shipping merchants. What became known later in the 18th century as the “Patronage System”, lasted until late in the 18th century in order to keep the Scots “quiet”.

Sir Colin Campbell 1732

Add to the equation the Scottish Jacobite “refugees” who had fled to Sweden and Austria and had, by the 18th century become members of the Swedish East India Company, founded by the Scottish trader Colin Campbell [right] and later in the Imperial Ostend East India Company [Austrian Netherlands], the number of Scots operating in Canton and Calcutta by the mid 18th century far exceeded any other single nation.

Campbell was knighted by the Swedish King Frederik I and was created Swedish Ambassador to China in 1732. Not only did this give the Scots in general a huge advantage in China, but it also protected Sweden against the dominant Spanish who tried to thwart any move to weaken their hold on trade. Spain intercepted Campbell’s ship Friedericus Rex Sueciae, but his diplomatic status saved the day [and the ship].

Throughout China’s history, the nation has had to deal with one major problem, China had a very harsh view on foreigners yet trade is crucial for a successful Chinese economy. Following basic Confucius beliefs, the merchant class is near the bottom of the society, but on the other conversely, the presence of trade and merchants is crucial to the survival of the Chinese economy and their way of life.

It was these extraordinary circumstances that allowed the Scots to steal the march on China and the East Indies from the English; that and the rapport they were able to find with the Chinese – a rapport the English never did manage to equal.

China saw their world in a series of three circles. On the inside of the circle were the Chinese. The outer circle the Chinese tributary states and on the outermost circle were everyone else. The Chinese has historically had a great issue with foreigners. Scotland, like China, had a history of wanting to remain a closed off nation, resisting incursion for as long as it could. China in the end had to relent; Scotland had already been down that route. But what the Scots and the Chinese shared was a like-mindedness that allowed them to profit from each other. Without it and the trade that ensued, wealth would not have been created, cities would not have existed without that unique mindset. Whether it was good or bad is a matter for conjecture. We do at least have a vast amount of superb silver and we have tea! We also still do have the mindsets.

http://chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

References:

“The Scottish Connection with India 1725-1833” – George K McGilvary, University of Edinburgh

British ‘Country Trade’ circa 1680-1770 – D K Bassett, Modern Asian Studies Vol.23 1989

Jardine Matheson; Traders of the Far East – Robert Blake. 1989

Scotland’s Empire – Thomas M Devine, 2003

The East India Register and Directory, 1799-1844

How Scots Finaced the Modern World – Liza Giffen, 2009

British Trade and the Opening of China – Michael Greenberg, 1951

The Thistle and the Jade; A Celebration of 175 Years of Jardine Matheson & Co, Maggie Keswick & Clara Weatherall, 2008

East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the 18th Century – Peter J Marshall, Oxford University Press, 1976

The Directors of the East India Company – James G Parker, University of Edinburgh, 1977

A Cup of Kindness: The History of the Royal Scottish Corporation – Justine Taylor, 2003

The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations – Douglas Watt, Edinburgh University Press, 2007

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions; Glasgow Museums; Bonhams, New Bond Street, London; Association of Small Collectors of Antique Silver; Brenda Ginsberg Art & Antiques; Tennants Auctioneers, UK; Mitchell Library, Glasgow; The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland; Mappin & Webb Archives, UK; scotcities.com; British Library East India Company Archive; Etudes Litéraires et Linguistiques de l’Université de Grenoble Etudes Ecossaises; Statistics Bureau of Guangzhou; Department of Market System Development, Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The Glasgow Connection 中國出口銀器: 格拉斯哥的聯系 appeared first on chinese export silver.

The art of cloisonné is often looked upon as a Chinese art and in some respects it is a correct assumption, however cloisonné, as a technique finds its roots back in the 13 century BCE Mycenaean era and the Mediterranean – or at least the earliest known examples are to be found there. Since this is a highly sophisticated process of enamelling, theories abound as to how and where the mechanics of enamel work and, in particular, encasing it within small enclosed cells [cloisons], evolved.

The technique is known to have surfaced in China in the 13th century CE – “known” being tangible examples of cloisonné work in a recognisable Chinese style, but since these examples display a high degree of sophistication and mastery of the art, it must be assumed the technique was being developed and used in China prior to this date.

Firstly, the word “cloisonné” is relatively new and is obviously French; the 13th century Chinese referred to it as da shi, meaning “muslim” or qiasi falang, ware in books of the time, though no examples are known to exist until the 14th century. The term, however, would indicate truth in the theory that Sassanians were experts, were responsible for developing the basic technique to a highly sophisticated level and exported wares and the technique to Spain, the Balkans and all countries along the Silk Route, including China and India. Sassanians, after all, were responsible for introducing the art of silversmithing to China; an art that appeared in China in the Sung and Tang dynasties.

It is during the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] that we see relatively large quantities of highly sophisticated Chinese cloisonné, as can be seen in this superb bowl. In Chinese cloisonné, blue came to be by far the most predominant colour and it is because of this the process became known as jingtai lan [Jingtai blue ware], named after the Emperor Jingtai [1450-57].

Although the technique must have entered and stayed in China in Chang’an, the capital of the Silk Route in the time the Sassanian merchants were dominant fixtures of the trading landscape, it is Beijing that became the historic spiritual home of Chinese cloisonné ware, not to be confused in any way with the much later so-called Canton enamel ware which was painted on freehand and did not use partitioned cells. Japanese cloisonné shippo did not come into its own until the 19th century about the same time as Karl Faberge and Khlebnikov were creating their enamel masterpieces in Imperial Russia, although cloisonné was being made in Russia as early as the 17th century by Lubavin and other Court silversmiths – possibly again attributable to Sassanian roots via the Balkans.

The seemingly sudden explosion of Chinese enamel ware during the Ming era is believed to be linked, in part, to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when skilled refugee artisans arrived in China; many of these artisans were of Sassanian stock and, as previously mentioned, Sassanians and enamelware were known in China prior to this event; the fall of Constantinople was quite simply the final catalyst to consolidate it as a Chinese art form. – the last piece in the jigsaw.

This Ming Dynasty turquoise cloisonné stemmed cup [below] demonstrates how refined and sophisticated the art had become in China within a relatively short period.

What is fascinating about the Ming Dynasty in relation to the history of Chinese silver making is that although it was during this Dynasty the Chinese obsession with accruing massive reserves of silver from around the world was at its peak and is seen by many to be the impetus that created the concept of world trade, actual manufacturing of silver wares appears to have declined temporarily. Any surviving silver items tends towards a trend for inlaying silver into bronze, as this Ming vase [left] clearly shows; one has to wonder whether cloisonné was influencing the silversmith’s art at this time.

While cloisonné wares continue to thrive, they meet again in the late 18th/early 19th centuries with mainstream silver making and the advent of Chinese Export Silver. It is the China Trade itself that acts as the catalyst in this instance; ships carrying tea and a variety of luxury cargoes re-create an awareness and eventually a mania for all things “oriental”.

This early 19th century silver gilt and silver filigree fan [below] is exquisitely embellished with cloisonné reserves of Chinese buildings within a traditional landscape in vivid blue and teal enamelling. This is the level of quality that epitomises one of the best retail silversmiths of Canton of the period, Cutshing.

The whole is completed with an equally exquisite lacquerwork box painted with gold figures within a decorative foliate motif. Silver filigree work was very much a part of the early Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period and is often used in tandem with cloisonné work; this unusual travelling lady’s dressing box [below] is a fine example.

Silver filigree ruyi sceptres, ceremonial objects in Chinese Buddhism, reached their artistic zenith as a result of the Qianlong Emperor’s specific request for ruyi sceptres to be presented by courtiers on Imperial birthdays and New Year celebrations. Sceptres conveyed wishes of longevity which is symbolised by the lingzhi fungus-shaped head that would often depict the Eight Immortals [below]; the meaning of ruyi being “as you wish” or “as one wishes”. Lingzhi literally means “supernatural mushroom” and ancient Chinese philosophers believed that these fungi should be consumed as drugs of immortality.

Ceremonial ruyi of the 18th and 19th century would often be encrusted with intricate cloisonné decoration in blues and yellows – the Imperial colours. The shaft of this ruyi supports a complicated group of eight immortals in enamelled silver, each holding their own tribute whilst standing amongst various flowering plants including prunus, plantain and fingered citron [aka Buddha’s Hand]. Standing figures of Shoulao, the stellar deity of longevity, holding a peach [symbol of immortality] and two scholars, one holding a sceptre and one a child, decorate the ruyi head. As with many ceremonial ruyi, it is teeming with allegorical symbolism.

This particular sceptre [below] carries the mark of the maker and, as with all Chinese silver of this period, authentic ruyi should carry such a mark. Since cloisonné work is still produced in Beijing, much of it of extremely high quality, it is not uncommon to come across ceremonial ruyi masquerading as 18th/19th century items; it is one of those unfortunate grey areas of Chinese silver making that can prove to be somewhat of a minefield.

This circa late 18th/early 19th century ruyi sceptre was made by Bao Xin, a Beijing silversmith who specialised in cloisonné work for the Imperial Court. The intricacy of the enamel work is quite phenomenal, given the head is approximately only 10cm wide.

Although by the mid 19th century most true cloisonné silver items were still being made in Beijing, silversmiths in other silver making centres did create silver items in tandem with cloisonné; this lidded canister below] by the Shanghai maker Jing Fu is not only a good example but it also high quality work. As should be the case, the canister carries the Jing Fu mark [right]. What must remain a mystery is whether the cloisonné work was carried out in Shanghai or in Beijing; there is a distinct difference in style, albeit it looks to traditional Chinese decorative motifs for its inspiration.

Whereas this Beijing-made canister [below] of the same period by Kai Tai keeps the tradition of small, rather convoluted millefiori-style cloisonné.

The mid 19th century is when Chinese silversmiths begin to incorporate cloisonné work with items such as tea pots and complete tea and coffee sets, coinciding with the movement in Chinese Export Silver to adopt a more high Chinese style as opposed to the neo-classical “copies” of Western silver that had been in demand for about 60 years or so. It is this tea ware that has become somewhat of a phenomenon, particularly among Chinese collectors. Unlike the highly intricate work of their ruyi predecessors, silversmiths first of all were not mainly Beijing-based and they were employing the technique of applying enamelled shaped panels onto finished silver items.

This three-piece tea set [above] carries the mark of the Canton and Shanghai retail silversmith Wo Shing and was made circa 1895. Being a retail silversmith, the work of this set is likely to be attributed to two artisan makers – one being a silversmith and the other being an enamel specialist. The phenomenon, however, is not the style or the work but the values work of this kind command at auction, this particular set having a figure at the lower end of the scale at £10,600 [$17,600] – nevertheless double or treble the amount a similar set by Wo Shing without enamel decoration would likely achieve.

At the other end of the value spectrum this particular phenomenon generates is this three-piece tea set [above] of exactly the same period as the Wo Shing set, this time carrying the mark of the retail silversmith Poh Sing who is often found to collaborate with an enamel master by the name of Huang Jiu Ji [see mark below right] who operated in Beijing. Again, the finished silver pieces are applied with enamel work panels, the difference being that Huang Jiu Ji has attained almost cult status among current-day Chinese collectors. While I am often castigated for mentioning values, it has to be said that the figure of £43,250 [$71,750], which was the auction room value of this set, has to have some relevancy.

The enamel work of both sets is not cloisonné work in the true traditional meaning of the technique, but it is enamel work that is enclosed in a “cloison” that takes the overall form of the motif. As the detail illustration shows [left] from another Huang Jiu Ji piece, just one petal is a cell in its own right and the rest of the flower head in one large cell.

Also related to this relatively recent buying phenomenon is another style of combining enamel work with Chinese silver work. This baluster vase carries the mark of the Beijing retail silversmith De Tian Li.

Two enamel techniques are employed on this vase, neither of them being cloisonné. The sea weeds and the traditional meander frieze are engraved into the body of the vase and then filled with enamel. The Koi carp and the elongated leaf frond border are hand painted enamel which is then fired.

The issue of whether there is a place or even a relevancy for seemingly inflated values within the history and research of a particular silver category is one that is often posed to me. Values have always been at odds with artistic merit or historical fact, yet whether it is liked or not there is an invisible umbilical cord linking the two. Many a fine art painting owes its fame to a hammer value in an auction room and one can certainly say the same of Chinese porcelain.

This 500 year old Ming Dynasty “chicken cup”, less than 8cm in diameter, was sold in Hong Kong for $HK250 million [£19.3 million/$32.32 million]. This surely has relevance to Ming porcelain and certainly to the 16 remaining known similar cups in the world. It is the first cup of its kind to be “re-patriated” to China.

I really can’t see why there should be a different rule for Chinese Export Silver, even if we disagree with what is being paid or the artistic merit. Similar debates have occurred during recent annals of art history; L S Lowry is an example – I can well-remember back in the 1980’s it was rather infra dig to be even discussing the upward trajectory of Lowry prices, yet now it is expected.

Likewise, if the Chinese collector fraternity see fit to elevate Guang Jiu Ji to a semi-cult status, who are we to comment – there are many Western silversmiths who have attained similar status. Personally I believe these isolated phenomena are similar to micro-climates where, for instance, a closely grouped collection of particular plants can create a more temperate atmosphere. Equally, a group of like-minded devotees of a particular silver style or maker or even simply followers of fashion can create a rise in value that exceeds the median value for that silver category. It is simply a matter of recognising when a phenomenon happens and accepting it for what and why it is.

It is also extremely important what is euphemistically called “the trade” doesn’t regard it as a bandwagon to take a ride on. The very use of the term “Chinese Export Silver” has become all too easily applied to any silver that looks vaguely “Chinese”; it is misleading and it is not particularly professional and I would certainly think that the majority of Chinese collectors are far more discerning than they might be given credit for.

Certainly in the past 12 months there seems to have been a rash of so-called “19th century Chinese silver gilt filigree” items appearing at Western auction houses and online auction sites.

The dome-lidded canister [above] is a perfect example and the first thing to note is that it is not filigree; it is manufactured using machine-made silver gilt mesh. The enamel work has been applied, albeit not unskilfully in this instance. It is not 19th century; it is not Chinese Export Silver; it is not even an antique. The rule of thumb is generally to be found in the mark and in this case it is the word SILVER stamped into a rather new looking base. No 19th century Chinese silversmith would have used such a stamp and certainly not in isolation of any other mark. Almost all of the items I referred to that fall into the category of this rather annoying phenomenon carry a similar mark or carry the word CHINA – sometimes both. Anything carrying these marks will have been made post-1949 when private enterprise became extinct in China and, as with all other manufacturing process, became nationalised and consolidated by the state into government owned collectives. Any self-respecting 19th century Chinese retail or manufacturing silversmith would have stamped a true piece of Chinese Export Silver appropriately and would have been proud to do so.

What is particularly annoying and misleading is that similar items regularly appear in auction sales of what are regarded as premier auction houses.

How and why these canisters suddenly flooded the market will probably remain a mystery but if anything did influence them other than trying to take a ride on the previously mentioned bandwagon, it can only be the exquisite work of 18th and 19th century Chinese masters of the true art of filigree. We have already seen the workmanship of the ceremonial ruyi sceptres whose meshwork base is a painstakingly hand-made silver filigree mesh. The well-respected Canton retail silversmith Cutshing was famous for creating enamel and bejewelled filigree items, much of it to European royal households, the Russian Imperial Court, Arab Sultanates and Maharajah’s palaces.

This highly elaborate silk lined basket is an example of Cutshing that was originally used in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg as a glove box. It is probably late 18th century as it is believed to have been used by Catherine the Great who died in 1796.

The level of workmanship and the techniques employed are completely different from the post-1940 canister that is trying to emulate it. This detail of a Chinese Export Silver filigree and enamel vase [below] of the same period as the Cutshing basket clearly demonstrates two totally unrelated and unconnected items.

The item [left] was described as being 19th century and Chinese. The only word that rings true there is “Chinese”; again this is a post 1949 piece of Chinese silver – nothing more, nothing less. It, too, carried the solitary SILVER stamp [below]

Many of these pseudo-19th century tea canisters don’t even have a solid metal inner container to make it airtight.

Lastly, I’d like to return to solid form silver incorporating enamel work. The large urn [right] is by Bao Cheng, but not the Bao Cheng most collectors might know in Shanghai and Tientsin, both of whom were not connected. This Bao Cheng is from Beijing as the mark it carries tells us.

There are two enamel techniques used here; the handles have been fashioned as a foliate frond with additional individual elements applied, perhaps even after enamelling was applied. The body of the vase has a painted floral composition that has been fired.

Dating this piece is not easy but I would put this piece towards the from end of the Republic Period but possibly the Warlord Era [1916-1928].

Such an item would be highly likely to attract a similar interest and level of value as the lower end of the Guang Jiu Ji scale might command. Appreciation of any art form can often be subjective and prevailing rules of the game may be inclined to fly out of the window – a phenomenon which in itself can command levels of criticism that are off the scale.

Enamel work as a technique, has a scale of expertise of its own and Chinese enamel work is certainly recognised very much as a much-revered Chinese skill. There are certainly parallels between antique Chinese and Russian enamel work, just as there are probably parallels in the subjective appreciation of it and how that can translate into how values might be perceived. There are no bandwagons; there are phenomena that do break the unwritten rules – we can only be aware of them and acknowledge them as and when they happen, but we shouldn’t climb aboard them and encourage the ride to go further by being overly “creative” about identity, age and even provenance. I have seen post-1949 canisters described as being “part of an important estate collection”. Well, the Duchess of Devonshire probably buys the occasional item at Poundland, which would make her purchase a part of the Chatsworth Estate and I am sure Barbara Bush pays the occasional visit to Dollar Tree; a provenance of sorts, but not 19th century, surely!

http://chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

References:

The Enamels of China & Japan, Maynard Giles Cosgrove, 1974

Enamel Ware – Collection of the Palace Museum, Chen Li Hua, 2008

Oriental Cloisonné and Other Enamels. Arthur & Grace Chu, 1975

The Arts of China 4th Edition, Michael Sullivan, University of California Press, 1999

History of Cloisonné Technique, Woodrow Carpenter

History and Techniques of Enamelling Before 1600, Brenda Tighe

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Veronica Parry in Manchester, UK for inspiring me to write on this subject.

Title illustration: Qianlong Cloisonné Guardian Lion, Albany Institute of History & Art

Ming “chicken cup” illustration: Associated Press

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions; Halls Fine Art Auctioneers, UK; Bonhams, Edinburgh; Bonhams, London; S&J Stodel, London, UK; The Vitreous Enamelers’ Society, UK; cultural-china.com; Darshana Daz at Encyclopaedia Brittanica; Henry Walters Collection, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Eloge de l”Art, Alain Truong; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; M S Rau Antiques, New Orleans; 2EZR, Los Angeles; Christie’s, Hong Kong; Skinners Inc, Boston; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.; Chamberlain Antiques, Amherst, New Hampshire, USA; Sotheby’s, Hong Kong; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; The Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The Enamel Revival Phenomenon 中國出口銀器:琺瑯的復興現象 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Easter Rarities 中國出口銀器: 復活節的珍寶

While religious items of Chinese Export Silver are relatively rare, they certainly do exist for the Muslim and Jewish faiths, both of which were minority religions that had relevancy to China, with items with Hindu decorative imagery obviously existing in larger numbers. Christian religious objects, though, are even more of a rarity and one can only marvel at how strange this actually is given Christianity had a presence in China since the Tang Dynasty and much of the Chinese Export Silver that was manufactured was made specifically for Christian countries.

The first wave of Christianity came to China in 635CE when Nestorian Christians, a Christian sect from Sassania, who were fleeing not just their homeland but the Sassanian Empire as a whole because of the increasing tension between the Roman and the Sassanian Empires; a tension that would finally lead to the downfall of the Sassanian Empire shortly afterwards in 651CE. Other “waves” were to follow during the Yuan Dynasty but the largest and most influential occurred during the Ming Dynasty with Jesuit Missionaries who arrived in Peking and settled. The Jesuits applied an unusually accommodating approach to their missionary work; one that incorporated recognition of the Chinese practice of ancestor worship and one that would eventually come to be strongly disapproved of by Rome.

Matteo Ricci [below] who came to Macau in 1578 and moved to China when he’d mastered the language, compiled the first Western Chinese dictionary and drew the first western-style map of China. Besides literature, Ricci studied music and astronomy. The Jesuits were quick to appreciate how Western and Chinese music might connect.

The clavichord, for example [in the painting, bottom left], sounds a lot like the Chinese guqing, the pipa like a lute. At least three Jesuit priests composed music in the Chinese style, adapting the Catholic mass to Chinese aesthetics. Jesuits who were in China at this period tended to embrace Chinese life completely, dressing in the Chinese style and speaking the language. Ricci, as with many Jesuits who came, had a connection with the early Portuguese China Trade and retained that link, possibly because it was of benefit to both the Jesuits and the Portuguese East India Company.

Ricci was the first to translate the Chinese classic texts into a Western language [Latin], and the first to translate the name of the most prominent Chinese philosopher Kong Fuzi as Confucius.

Along with another Jesuit father, he was the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing, during the reign of the Wanli Emperor.

Matteo Ricci and his baptised Chinese colleague, the mathematician, astronomer, and agronomist Xu Guangqi [1562–1633] both depicted in the engraving [right], were the first to translate the ancient Greek mathematical treatise of Euclid’s Elements into Chinese in 1607.

It is because of this continued presence of Jesuits in China were few, if any, particularly in the interior and Beijing itself, Westerners were permitted to enter, that much of what we know of China in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was originally communicated to the outside world

Knowledge of Chinese porcelain, for example, filtered out to the West courtesy of the Jesuits. A description of the manufacture of porcelain in 1713 by French Jesuit priest Father D’Entrecolles, a Jesuit missionary resident in Peking, relates the firing of blue and white porcelain “A beautiful blue colour appears on the porcelain after having been lost for some time. When the colour is first painted on, it is pale black; when it is dry and the glaze has been put on it, it disappears entirely and the porcelain seems quite white, the colour being buried under the glaze. But the fire makes it appear in all its beauty, almost in the same way as the natural heat of the sun makes the most beautiful butterflies, with all their tints, come out of their eggs”.

One would naturally assume the painting below of the Emperor K’aing-hsi was by a Chinese artist, but nothing could be further from the truth; this is a painting by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione who came to China in 1715 where he was then to live at the court of three successive Emperors in Beijing.

During the reign of Emperor K’aing-hsi [1661-1722], Castiglione was given the honour of being made the First Painter which was repeated with the following Emperor Chien-lung.

The Jesuit communication with the “outside world” created some interesting Sino-esque philosophical writing by Europeans. This treatise [below] by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz written in 1697, Novissima Sinica [Latest News From China], a neo-Confucian theory of pre-established harmony, was created almost entirely from dialogue with Jesuits in China.

With a firmly rooted presence in China, both physically and trying not to be at odds with “the three teachings,” Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism – the harmonious aggregate, it is puzzling why evidence of Chinese Christian imagery and objects is so rare.

This 19th century Chinese Export Silver chalice is not only rare as being a definitively Christian object, but it is rare inasmuch as it is in the true high Victorian gothic style – in this respect it is probably unique. Created for Khecheong, one of the most notable 19th century retail silversmiths in Canton, it could easily be mistaken for a pure Pugin design and certainly worthy of being in an English cathedral.

Luckily, we know the provenance of this chalice, as it carries the engraved inscription “To Basil Scott from his Grandfather JS, 1867”. The bowl of the chalice takes the form of an octagonal font shape, each panel decorated with entwined and architectural Gothic arch motifs with trailing foliage against a matted ground. A pendant apron of frosted acanthus leaves surmounts a simulated basket weave bulbous border decorated with leaves. The tapered stem and base is chased and applied with leaves edged with a further border of high relief trailing vine tendrils.

Basil Scott eventually grew up to become the Chief Justice of Bombay in 1908.

Writing this at Eastertide, I would dearly liked to have discovered a Chinese Christian object, notably in Chinese Export Silver, that was connected to Easter, but none of my extensive research has ever unearthed such an object. The best I can do under such duress is this exotic and rather sumptuous ostrich egg that has been mounted in an elaborate silver bamboo cage.

Created for Hoaching, another notable retail silversmith in Canton in the 19th century, this object is probably as unusual and unique as the Khecheong chalice and bordering on being as excessive as a Fabergé egg might be, albeit minus the gemstones.

The intricate open silver cage supporting the egg has obviously taken its inspiration from Chinese Export Silver goblets and there are several elements that are particularly signature Hoaching detailing.

The delicate bamboo stems and fronds of the Hoaching “pagoda” tazza [above left] and the use of the traditional Chinese decorative motif of exposed bamboo roots upon a mound seen in the Hoaching goblet [above right] have been clearly incorporated into the ostrich egg piece.

Was it made specifically for Easter? Sadly, we can never know, but the existence of an ostrich egg in China, although not unique, is probably linked in some way to one of the many Chinese immigrants who went to Australia in the 19th century, some of which did return to China towards the end of the 19th century having made their fortune and were ready to create businesses in China.

There have certainly been precedents of coconuts used in Chinese Export Silver items, of which this circa 1830 Cutshing coconut and silver goblet [below] is a superb example and, as with the Gothic chalice, displays no recognisable Chinese workmanship, in fact it could easily be an example of Elizabethan English exotica.

Given the protracted history of a relatively entrenched Christian presence in China, it is really remarkable how few Christian ritual objects of each era of that history remain. Certainly, as each era came to a close, violence often accompanied the final closing of the doors. It is certainly true of the Boxer Rebellion at the end of there 19th century, which had a pointedly anti-Christian and anti foreign imperialism driven cause. This rebellion was particularly violent and is it highly likely a large amount of valuable Chinese Christian art and artefacts were destroyed along with lives lost, given the final sieges were centred upon Beijing as well as a number of treaty ports where there were significant Western communities.

During the Boxer Rebellion as a whole, a total of 136 Protestant missionaries and 53 children were killed, and 47 Catholic priests and nuns. Thirty thousand Chinese Catholics, 2,000 Chinese Protestants, and 200-400 of the 700 Russian Orthodox Christians in Beijing were estimated to have been killed. Collectively, the Protestant dead were called the China Martyrs of 1900. The Boxers went on to murder Christians across 26 prefectures.

The above icon was only commissioned in 1990 but it depicts the Holy Chinese Martyrs of the Chinese Orthodox Church who were canonised before 1917.

During the mid 19th century, a 14 year rebellion took place in China that was tantamount to widespread civil war. The Taiping Rebellion was waged against the ruling Manchu Qing Dynasty because of widespread malcontent fuelled by corruption, famine and poor economy. It was a highly unusual conflict; it also resulted in 20 million dead.

It was a millenarian movement led by Hong Xiuquan, who announced that he had received visions in which he learned that he was the younger brother of Jesus. Hong established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing. The Kingdom’s army controlled large parts of southern China, at its height ruling about 30 million people. The rebel agenda included social reforms such as shared “property in common,” equality for women, and the replacement of Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion with their form of Christianity. Because of their refusal to wear the queue, Taiping combatants were nicknamed “Longhairs”.

The Qing government eventually crushed the rebellion with the aid of French and British forces but not before the wanton destruction of a huge amount of historic ritual artefacts had taken place, not to mention loss of life.

Protestantism and Catholicism both existed in China, albeit somewhat at odds with each other. Even so, the dearth of Christian ritual objects that survive is hard to believe. This mid 19th century Chinese Export Silver thurible is incredibly rare, given they must have existed in the hundreds, if not thousands, across China, but one of the most beautiful and particularly poignant in the context of Easter is this 19th century Chinese Jesuit crucifix inlaid with mother of pearl on rosewood. The intricate inlay displays a plethora of Chinese decorative motifs that include intertwining grape clusters, peonies, prunus branches and lotus flowers above an image of the Passion of Christ.

The centre of the cross has the Eucharistic Chalice, with the host radiating light, and a dove, contained in a crown of thorns above, and the Immaculate Heart of Holy Mary pierced by swords, and the Arma Christi [the Instruments of the Passion] below, adorned with peonies and floral scrolling and a Chinese vase at the very bottom.

Extraordinary as this piece is, we know of at least two such crucifixes recorded; it is not recorded, however, where they were made in China.

It was not uncommon for Jesuits to have run orphan schools for boys in China that tended to have a focus on teaching arts and crafts. Probably the most famous was the Jesuit-run T’ou Se We school in Shanghai which is widely regarded as the spiritual home of the arts and crafts movement in China.

T’ou Se We came about as a result of Taiping troops attacking Shanghai causing a large amount of civilians to become destitute and homeless. Many orphans were displaced as a result of the war. To help mitigate the disaster ravaging the city, the Catholic Diocese of Shanghai bought Tushanwan [T’ou Se We in Shanghainese dialect], bulldozed the mountain and began a massive construction project originally named the “Southern Orphanage”. Their aim was to build a large-scale orphanage capable of accommodating the 400 displaced orphans from the Qingpu Hangtang orphanage and the Dongjiadu orphanage in Shanghai. The facility was named the Tushanwan Orphanage [T’ou Se We], the year was 1852. Acting on a foundation of Christian charity, Jesuit missionaries provided the orphans with clothing, food and education. They did all this to equip the orphans with the skills necessary to support themselves and flourish in society. The orphanage also became the place where Western culture, art and technology were introduced into China. Essentially, it was the confluence where Chinese and Western cultures could mix and integrate with each other. The Tushanwan Orphanage trained China’s first Western-style painters, sculptors, photo-mechanic professionals, printers, industrial artists and a large number of other skilled craftsmen. The orphanage was thus instrumental in the creation of modern Chinese culture and was a pioneer in the introduction of the arts and crafts movement that stayed a part of the ethos of the orphanage. Apart from stained glass, silver-making, copper beating, bronze statuary, printing and fine art, extraordinary examples of creative woodcarving and woodwork that included some significant pieces of furniture emanated from T’ou Se We. The school had its own foundry that made bells for churches in China as well as around the world.

Given T’ou Se We was a Jesuit institution particularly known for its elaborate woodwork, it is highly likely the inlaid crucifix may have been created there.

South Cathedral, known as the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, is the oldest Catholic Church in China. It was first built by Italian missionary Matteo Ricci during the reign of Emperor Wanli in the Ming Dynasty. It was rebuilt under the direction of Adam Schall. Schall, a Jesuit missionary and tutor to the Emperor Kang Xi, one of a series of missionaries who served in the Imperial Court. After being destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the time of Emperor Qianlong, the church was closed in 1827 by Emperor Dao Guang but saved from confiscation by the Portuguese Bishop of Beijing. The current building was constructed in 1904.

The Jesuits’ 16th century strategy of serving the state as “foreign experts” bringing in new ideas and technology, helped sustain political tolerance and was well received by the social elite. It was a role played earlier by the Nestorians and later by the pioneer Protestants. Robert Morrison, a Scot, later became the first modern “China expert” serving as interpreter and translator for both officials and traders alike. Every generation of missionaries and Chinese Christians also have wrestled with balancing evangelism with ministries of service. The Church was often affected by trends in international trade.

The key moments in Chinese history – the collapse of the Ming dynasty and later the Qing dynasty, were periods of openness to Christianity, as the elite sought to find a new social philosophy and ethics to suit new circumstances. This is happening again today, as the incumbent political system is gradually evolving. The legacy and history of Christianity in China is a long and rich one and, as everything that happens in China, so uniquely Chinese. It is sad that the tangible evidence of that legacy is thin on the ground as a result of the tumultuous nature of that history.

CLICK ON THIS LINK TO LISTEN TO AMIOT’S “MASS OF THE JESUITS IN PEKING”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b_ZjTnAGV8

http://chinese-export-silver.com

http://chinese-export-silver.com/catalogue-of-makers-marks/

References:

Nestorius and His Teaching, Cambridge University Press, 1908.History of Eastern Christianity.

A. S. Atiya. Notre Dame University of North Dakota Press, 1968.

By Foot to China, John M.L.Young, Japan Presbyterian Mission

Christian Missionaries in China, J. Breen

Giuseppe Castiglione – A Painter at the Court of 3 Chinese Emperors, Carolyn McDowell

A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony, Julia Boyd, 2012

The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Joseph W Esherick,University of California Press, 1987

The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study. Xiang, Lanxin, 2003

The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1800–1914, Robert A. Bickers

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, Stephen R. Platt. 2012

God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, Jonathan Spence, 1996

The Legacy of Chinese Christianity and China’s Identity Crisis, Dr Carol Lee Hamrin, 2006

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, USA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, Massachusetts; Global China Center, Virginia, USA; Bonhams, London

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.com archive

The post META-MUSEUM:CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Easter Rarities 中國出口銀器: 復活節的珍寶 appeared first on chinese export silver.

CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: The East-West Divide 中國出口銀器:東西方的分裂

Well into his third year of research, Adrien von Ferscht has always maintained a deep appreciation of the neo-classical Chinese Export Silver – a product of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. As his research has progressed, he has become increasingly aware of the trend of the majority of Chinese collectors and buyers to shun these pieces in favour of the later high-Chinese style items or the silver gilt filigree pieces that immediately preceded. This has prompted him to write the following article in order to highlight how the neo-classical pieces are superb in their own right and are comparable to the very finest contemporary silversmiths in America, Britain and the rest of Europe, that they are often of museum quality and can command and sustain values far in excess – and rightly so, he thinks.

He also argues that fiscal values of antique silver do have a place in the appreciation of art and in the history of art, his argument being that high values can actually increase awareness and appreciation and, in doing so, often preserve the silver from completely disappearing; patrons have always historically had a place in the production of art in all its forms, so why not in owning and preserving it!

Von Ferscht believes fervently the ability to have made these neo-classical items with such skill and artistry is just as much a part of Chinese cultural history as the more overtly traditional Chinese pieces. He also believes these pieces should be celebrated by Chinese collectors, rather than overlooked – they are testament to the extraordinary skill of 18th & 19th century Chinese silversmiths

Chinese Export Silver is without doubt the most complex world antique silver category; apart from silver from antiquity, it also has the longest continuous manufacturing period – 155 years.

Its complexity is derived from the fact it is the only silver category to have existed as a direct result of world politics and national protectionism. It is probably one of the only significant silver categories where the lack of any assay system and recording of workshops and their production have made research extremely difficult. That said, almost 300 makers have now been identified, yet thousands still remain to be researched, in fact it is probably impossible to ever estimate how many silversmiths were operating in China during this period.

Since the phenomenon we know as the China Trade was the real catalyst that brought this silver into being, it has always been taken for granted that it was made specifically for export. To assume this would imply a clear distinction between silver made for the export market and silver made for the home Chinese market. It’s a wrong assumption to make; the same workshops were making silver for both the overseas and home markets; the same retail silversmiths were selling to Chinese as well as foreign merchants, sea captains and their crews. What is true is that early Chinese Export Silver pieces were predominantly faithful copies of the British, American and European neo-classical styles made for those markets, but this was relatively short-lived and it quickly gave way to a gradual transition of Chinese decorative motifs in European forms. This evolved even further into a busy high Chinese style that suited the high Victorian era it found itself in as well as being in tune with the rising resurgence of a more modern take on the Chinoiserie style in Europe and America.

Having researched Chinese Export Silver for over three years now, I am convinced it is far more correct to regard it as a manufacturing period that encapsulates all silver created in China between 1785-1940. My research has also revealed that it is virtually impossible to understand Chinese Export Silver without knowing the 1200 year history of Chinese silver making that preceded it – it was never a silver category that came into being suddenly from nowhere; it was simply the silver of the circumstances of the times.

As a definitive silver category, we are only just beginning to see it as a regular phenomenon in auction houses around the world. While it is no longer a curiosity, there is a dichotomy of how it is perceived; in the West it is mainly seen as interesting and unusual silver of quality that a minority of Western collectors seek, while in China it is seen as silver representing lost heritage and its acquisition is very much linked to the rapidly rising affluent middle class in China.

Earlier this year, Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auction in the UK took the bold step of deciding the time was right to specialise in Chinese Export Silver by appointing me as a consultant. This was an equally bold step for me, for apart from brief forays into the commercial world, I tended to stay in the relatively safe world of academia, but having taken the step I now find I have a better understanding of the actual silver; the sometimes quite pronounced preferences of different buying sectors adds a whole new dimension. For Dreweatts, it places them in a totally unique position; they are the only auction house in the world able to offer in-house expertise for Chinese Export Silver. Being active in the commercial world has made me aware of some of the extraordinary amount of silver that is either wrongly attributed to Chinese Export Silver or incorrectly attributed to being 19th or early 20th century when it is clearly of post-1949 manufacture. One is constantly reminded of the fact that Chinese Export Silver [or in fact any popular silver category] is not a convenient band-wagon to take a ride on simply because it is a silver category clearly in demand.

Chinese collectors of Chinese Export Silver are extremely savvy, being very quality-conscious and reasonably knowledgable of the workshop and retail silversmith marks. The majority of Western auction houses are sadly on a lower knowledge plateau; one which often tends to regard the very term “Chinese Export Silver” as a bandwagon that is useful to take a ride on and upon which any silver item that vaguely looks “Chinese” finds itself loaded on to. Silver marks are often referred to as either “hallmarks” or “character marks” and given more and more Chinese buyers are following auctions, such a reference is pretty pointless. Antique Japanese, Siamese and Straits silver disturbingly find themselves reclassified as Chinese and even when a mark is correctly identified, little will be known of the name and reputation behind the mark.

The differences between West versus East in the context of Chinese Export Silver are as manifold and complex as the silver itself. Much of the early “Georgian” style pieces are considered museum quality and are highly sought after by Western collectors and museums; an opinion that is currently not particularly shared by Chinese connoisseurs, while the importance of Chinese Export Silver within the rich cultural history of China as a whole is not fully realised either. This is in so many ways regrettable since it is an admirable reflection of the extremely high quality of workmanship of the Chinese silversmiths of the late 18th and early 19th century, given this silver had absolutely no connection with the culture and history of China, yet the end results were exceptional examples of mimicry, in the best sense of the word. – they are by no means sub-standard pastiches. It would, and indeed should, be far more preferable that Chinese collectors recognise these pieces as testaments to the superb skills of Canton silversmiths, those skills being just as much worthy of being an integral part of Chinese heritage as a silver object rendered in an intricate collation of traditional Chinese motifs; both are potentially museum-quality.

The circa 1840 tea set illustrated above by the Canton retail silversmith Cutshing is a fine example of Chinese Export Silver in the true neo-classical style. Notwithstanding Chinese silver of this period was consistently made of silver in the region of 30% heavier and thicker gauge to its European counterparts, the Cutshing set may comfortably be considered a Chinese comparable of Paul Storr silver of the same period, as we can see from this tea pot below. This is unfortunately not a fact always acknowledged or concurred with by Western purists. My own view would argue that having Chinese silversmiths with the capability and mastery of silver to create such a quality example as the Cutshing set is extraordinary in itself, given the neo-classical style had no connection whatsoever with early 19th century Chinese culture.

The same could possible be said of Paul Storr whose workshop would probably only have had a notional and idealised view of what the Chinese style is, having no knowledge of the allegorical meaning of almost all traditional Chinese decorative motifs. This William IV Paul Storr 1831 teapot [below] incorporates whimsical allusions to Chinese decorative motifs with the inclusion of prunus blossom with acanthus, but it is in no way Chinese in the pure sense of the style and certainly could never have been conceived by a Chinese master silversmith.

The China Trade, by default of the restrictions imposed upon foreign merchants, was totally centred in Canton. Had it not been for the tea and opium trades which comprised the lion’s share of the trade, it is highly unlikely Chinese Export Silver would have been born. The fact that the quality of workmanship and the silver itself was high, yet the actual manufacturing and the raw silver were cheap relative to Europe and America was the equation that presented itself in Canton, it still wouldn’t have guaranteed the extent Chinese Export Silver would grow. The merchants may have had a presence in Canton but it was the fact the ships offered ballast space that allowed all the peripheral luxury trade goods of the China Trade to be carried at relatively minimal cost. Tea and opium were the main profit earners; silver, lacquer ware, silks, jade, ivory etc were all simply added bonuses, albeit lucrative.

While much of the China Trade might be unpalatable to 21st century minds, it did exist and it is as much part of the history of Chinese culture as it is of America, Britain and European nations who traded with China; much of it has a rich cultural history which has been either forgotten or overshadowed.

In late 18th century Canton there was one silversmith who particularly gained a reputation as a consummate creator of superb items of filigree in the rococo style; filigree and the rococo were almost born to be together. The silversmith in question is Pao Ying and we know of him operating from Old China Street from circa 1780, which indicates he was probably a retail silversmith who commissioned items from artisan silversmiths firmly under his control. The late 17th century is when we see the very beginnings of the Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period emerging; it is also still a period where much of the silver made in China did not carry any silver mark and Pao Ying is one of the earliest makers to begin adopting this formal identification. Given 1780 is the generally accepted beginning of the Chinese Export Silver period, we are left with probably 100 years where silver such as the pair of lidded earns above as well as silver decorated very much in the Chinese style but on objects that are discernibly Western or Islamic being made specifically for clients outside of China. Some of these were tributes from the Chinese Imperial court for European royal households and Eastern potentates, while others were specially commissioned pieces.

This Chinese silver gilt coffee pot and tray [below] are dated circa 1680 and are part of the Royal Collection. Although the provenance of how it came to be in the collection is not known, it is highly likely this would have been a tribute gift from Kangxi to King Charles II. Yet again, this is a fine example of the art of the Chinese silversmiths given that coffee had only been introduced to England less than 30 years prior to this pot being made; certainly a coffee pot would have been an alien concept to a Chinese artisan, yet here we have a masterly fusion of the Chinese style into a Western object. Sadly, being 17th century, there is no maker’s mark as was the normal practice at the time.

Should such a coffee pot ever present itself at an auction house, Chinese collectors would pay a premium to own such an item. They would do so not only because of its age and quality but the fact it is decorated in the Chinese style. Chinese buyers would do likewise for items such as the filigree urns which are typical of work produced by Pao Ying, as in fact happened when these very urns were sold at auction earlier this year for $40,600 [£24,300] to a Chinese collector; yet these urns are not particularly in the Chinese style, they are Baroque.

This presents us with a confusing dichotomy of the preferences of Chinese buyers of Chinese Export Silver that also points to overlooking the early neo-classical items. Good quality filigree Chinese Export Silver makes a relatively rare appearance in auction sales and when it does, it will perform well. It would be a momentous occasion if a 17th century item the same ilk as the coffee pot made it to auction; it does happen and when it does, the roof is raised. Yet we are talking of a rarity of both and certainly Chinese filigree is one of those grey areas where authenticating a true 18th or early 19th century piece is not always straightforward. Neo-classical Chinese Export Silver by Cutshing and contemporary retail silversmiths such as WE WE WC, Linchong, Sun Shing, W.W., Woshing and others, items exist in abundance and they are testaments to genius of Chinese silversmithing, many of them of museum quality.

This circa 1835 Woshing toast rack in the Georgian style is a fine example; when would an early 19th century Chinese silversmith have ever seen a toast rack, let alone knew how it was used; when would a Chinese silversmith ever have seen a slice of toast!

This superb circa 1840 egg cruet by Houcheong; a totally alien object to a Canton maker yet masterfully created to rival the work of best of the London silversmiths, as is the circa 1840 Khecheong fish slice [below]

This WE WE WC gem of the art of silver making [below]; a silver gilt 5 piece tea and coffee set was made circa 1840 is exquisite and rare to an extreme. To those searching for the 5th piece – the teapot is sitting on its own stand. Each of the larger pieces have basket weave bands at the shoulders and running leaf tip rims. The teapot handle rises from an elaborate female mask as the close up detail image shows below.

To many, even making an allusion to values is an anathema; it is something I certainly have at times been castigated for in the past, being felt by some “purists” that discussing the merits of art in the same breath as fiscal values is somehow discrediting. The same purists would argue that monetary values have no place in the appreciation of art or in the history of art. – something I would vehemently beg to differ with. Throughout history the creation and the ownership of art in most of its forms has had a monetary connection, often in the form of patronage which facilitated its creation in the first place. Without patronage, much of the visual and tangible fine art we value today simply wouldn’t exist. At the same time, ownership is a form of patronage and the desire to own is one of the engines that drives the continuum which in turn drives the momentum of worth; a momentum that can go either upwards or downwards according to the fickleness of fashion.

Viewing this is in the context of the neo-classical Chinese Export Silver period [for a period it definitely is], one would have to bring into that equation the relative rarity of this silver in tandem with the high quality of manufacture. To do so would imply a greater monetary value than other Chinese Export Silver which in turn has potential investment implications.

Personally I take the view that if the prospects of a good investment become an intrinsic part of collecting neo-classical Chinese Export Silver, this is not such a bad thing – it can only increase awareness and appreciation of this silver and it will guarantee its survival where so much other neo-classical silver is lost to the scrap heap. The investment value is but one factor in the ownership of art; it can also serve as as a generator of awareness and interest. Most important of all, it will finally bring it into the fold of mainstream Chinese cultural history where it deserves to be.

The extraordinary capability of the silversmiths of the early Chinese Export Silver period to produce neo-classical silver of such quality is just as much a part of Chinese culture as the silver created in the high Chinese style. This is not silver to be passed over; it is silver that needs to be applauded, appreciated and treasured. There is nothing whimsical about these pieces; they are fine examples of Georgian-style silver that embrace the ethics of that style, whereas this example of a Tiffany silver jug [below] is quite definitely a whimsical notion of a “Chinese” landscape trapped within a Victorian Gothic fantasy.

The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing

學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆

This is a quote from Confucius’ Analects; surely we have arrived at a time when all Chinese Export Silver should be embraced for what it is – the product of the genius of the Chinese silversmiths. Genius it is; treasures to be valued they are.

References:

Paul Storr, 1771-1844: Silversmith and Goldsmith, Norman M. Penzer

Acknowledgements:

Danny Cheng in Hong Kong for his translation skills

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions; Royal Collection Trust – Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Christie’s, New York; A.C.Silver, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK; Supershrink online; Antiques & The Arts Weekly

Unless otherwise stated, all images are from the www.chinese-export-silver.comarchive

The post META-MUSEUM: CHINESE EXPORT SILVER – The East-West Divide 中國出口銀器:東西方的分裂 appeared first on chinese export silver.

T’OU SÈ WÈ 土山湾: THE BIRTHPLACE OF CHINESE MODERN CREATIVE ARTS

The T’ou Sè Wè Legacy

That a Jesuit orphanage and school in Shanghai founded in the 19th century should be the cradle of modern creative art in China is extraordinary in itself, but it is firmly rooted in a significant Jesuit presence in China since the mid-17th century and the profound influence it had on the Imperial court.

The same influence was instrumental in creating many of China’s early 20th century artists; an influence that even touched Madame Chang Kai-Chek and the Belgian creator of Tintin, Hergé. Combine this with the equally extraordinary Empress Dowager Cixi who was the de-facto ruler of China and through whose influence and sheer determination of mind transformed her realm from being an ancient empire to a modern state.

This is the world the T’ou Sè Wè orphanage and school in Shanghai found itself in; the Jesuit masters embraced the new renaissance, managing to create a force that produced China’s own distinctive version of Jugendstil – the bedrock of China’s age of modern art and the vast surge of creativity we are witnessing today.

The T’ou-Sè-Wè Jesuit orphanage and school had, until recently, become virtually forgotten, yet 125 years ago it was to have a seismic influence in introducing the Arts and Crafts movement to China and, in doing so, created a lasting legacy of its own very particular style as well as the foundation of modern Chinese creative art as we know it today. These Shanghai orphans produced work that literally wowed the world. Sadly, few people today realise the extent of the T’ou-Se-We legacy to Chinese modern arts. It not only played an extremely important role in introducing and popularising Western arts in China, but it was responsible for creating astoundingly skillful works across a wide spectrum of disciplines – woodcarving, sculpture, painting, printing, stained glasswork, embroidery and metalwork, of which silver making was but one shining star. That all this took place in a Jesuit orphanage in China in the late 19th century/early 20th century might seem incredulous, but the reality was to be the final jewel in the crown of what had been centuries of Jesuit artistic and academic influence in the Celestial Empire.

One might think that Jesuits and the Chinese made strange bed fellows but almost from the very beginning of a Jesuit presence in China, an enigmatic synergy was present. After the establishment of a Portuguese colony at Macau in the 16th century, a number of Jesuits visited there as well as to Canton nearby along the Pearl River. Not long afterwards in 1563 a Jesuit settlement was established at Macau that was successful in terms of becoming established but had very limited effect in terms of missionary outreach due to the fact they only spoke Portuguese. It wasn’t long before the weak communication link was realised and in 1579 Michele Ruggieri arrived, soon after joined by Matteo Ricci in 1582. Both were not only determined to master the Chinese language but they had grasped the importance of understanding the culture and, in particular, Confucianism; they knew the Chinese had an ancient culture where intelligence and learning were highly valued and they understood it was based on a different, but parallel, philosophy to that of Europe.

Ruggieri returned to Europe to find further suitable Jesuit recruits to bolster Ricci’s already formulating plans and soon Ricci was joined by Adam Schall von Bell, an astronomer, and Ferdinand Verbiest, a mathematician, cartographer and astronomer.

Verbiest remained in China for 29 years became a high mandarin at the Imperial court in Beijing and was considered a close friend of the Emperor. Von Bell was appointed by the Emperor as director of the Imperial observatory; Ricci remained in China for the rest of his life. He created a map of the world that successfully demonstrated to the Emperor the world was round, but his legacy was numerous translations of classical Western philosophical works into Chinese and he and Ruggieri began the monumental task of translating the entire Confucian canon that was carried on by successive Jesuit scholars in China until the first volume was published in Paris in 1583 and was presented to Louis XIV of France for the Sun King’s personal library at Versailles.

This was to be the foundation of a continuous and active Jesuit presence in China until the late 19th century. While being able to have found almost unprecedented favour with the Imperial court, it did have its negative points, for when fortunes fell for the court, the Jesuits could find themselves vulnerable and even made scapegoats. Jesuits who died while at the court were buried in Beijing; a somewhat strange anomaly that theoretically ran counter to Chinese culture and its reverential treatment of ancestors and their burial places.

The ensuing centuries brought many challenges to the expanding network of Jesuit centres across China and even from the Vatican itself, but none more so than in the mid-late 19th century with the 14 year Taiping Rebellion and the later so-called Boxer Rebellion by the Militia United in Righteousness [Yihetuan] who were violently opposed to foreign imperialism and particularly to Christianity.

During the Taiping Rebellion more than 20 million Chinese lost their lives. Between 1851 and 1862 there were three major attacks on the Shanghai area that had a devastating effect; in the 1861 attack some 10,000 Shanghainese were killed. By the end of the conflict, Shanghai had many destitute and homeless as well as a significant orphaned children problem. To help mitigate the disaster ravaging the city, the Catholic Diocese of Shanghai acquired Tushanwan [T’ou Se We in Shanghainese dialect], bulldozed the existing hill and began a massive construction project originally named the “Southern Orphanage”. Their aim was to build an orphanage complex capable of accommodating the 400 displaced orphans from the Qingpu Hangtang and the Dongjiadu orphanages in Shanghai. Acting on the concept of Christian charity, the Jesuit missionaries provided the orphans with clothing, food and education. The orphans were to be equipped with the skills necessary to support themselves and flourish in society and, in doing so, the orphanage quickly developed into a place where Western culture, art, thought and technology were introduced into China. In reality it became the confluence where Chinese and Western cultures could mix and integrate with each other, producing a unique T’ou Se We style. The Tushanwan Orphanage trained China’s first Western-influenced painters, sculptors, photo-mechanic professionals, printers, industrial artists and a large number of other skilled craftsmen including metalwork and silversmithing. The orphanage was thus instrumental in the creation of a modern Chinese creative culture, causing many ‘firsts’ in technological history as applied to the decorative arts.

The founder of the workshops was the Jesuit Spanish Brother Juan Ferrer born near Valencia in 1817. His father had been a distinguished sculptor who had worked on the decoration of the Escorial Palace. He entered the Jesuit order in Naples where he was completing his artistic education and, on his request, was sent to China in 1847. With the approval of his superiors he founded a training workshop in Xujianhui [Zi-ka-wei], the domain where Jesuits in Shanghai were gathering their various works and schools, in 1852. The workshop educated outstanding Chinese sculptors and painters, working first for religious buildings and later on extending the range of its activities and extending the workshops and artisanal skills. Juan Ferrer died a premature death in 1856.

The Fine Art studio and the Print workshop in the latter part of the 19th century

Other professors and artists at the orphanage included Brother Nicolas Massa [1815-1870] who taught oil painting, Brother Lu Baidu [1836-1880], Brother Adolphe Vasseur [1828-1899], and, most notably, Brother Liu Bizhen [1845-1912], all of whom were highly skilled woodcut engravers who produced work for evangelical publications – T’ou Se We students would often colour the prints, many of them woodcuts of the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines. T’ou Se We expanded its printing into photo-engravure and in the early 1900’s, Wenming, the largest Chinese publishing house began using T’ou Se We prints in its textbooks.

These paintings [below] were completed by T’ou Se We students in 1914 for a collection of arts and crafts items representing the newly formed Republic of China at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition held the following year in San Francisco. The paintings created in traditional Chinese watercolours on paper. Each subject is depicted in his usual attire surrounded by the religious, scientific, and musical objects through which they achieved their fame and are inspired by the 18th century book “Description géographique,historique,chronologique,politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise” that feature famous Jesuit missionaries in China. At the head of each painting is a biography written by Xia Dingyi, with one dated Minguo 3 [1914]. At the foot of each painting after the signature are the letters T.S.W. for T’ou-sé-wéi [Tushanwan].

The painting studio at the school eventually was elevated to School of Fine Art status

It is probably the woodcarving work that was produced at T’ou Se We that is one of the more significant disciplines taught and mastered there. It was of incredible quality and intricacy and it found its way around the world, sometimes in the most obscure places.

The ingenuity of the Jesuit fathers at T’ou Se We to have students’ work both shown and used all over the world is quite staggering. The 1933 Eisteddfod bardic chair that took students over a year to create was presented to the National Eisteddfod in Wales by a successful Welsh business living in Shanghai at the time. Dr John Robert Jones, a barrister and an avid Eisteddfod-goer also showed great interest in Chinese art and culture. He went to Shanghai in 1924, became General Secretary of the International Council in 1928, and was a leading figure in the Shanghai branches of the Royal Asiatic Society and Cymdeithas Dewi Sant. It was his idea to commission the students of T’ou-se-we to make the chair. An almost identical chair, also made at T’ou-se-we, was used in the 1926 Swansea Eisteddfod.

The chair is a testament to the ability of the Jesuits in China to knowingly connect with other faiths and cultures; the bardic chair is used at the Eisteddfod by the Archdruid and is supposedly based on ancient Celtic Druidry which is essentially pagan, although the modern equivalent of the Eisteddfod has predominantly Christian ritual.

The archway [below] was created in 1912 at the orphanage and was first used in the 1915 San Francisco exposition, was used a second time at the 1933 Chicago World Fair and then at the New York World Fair in 1939. It then went to Indiana University and eventually found its way to Sweden. It now forms the centrepiece of the T’ou Se We Museum in Shanghai.

Magnificent carved Fu Dogs form the base of each of the four columns to the archway. It is hard to imagine how students so young could produce work so intricate and of such superb quality.

The stained glass workshops at T’ou Se We not only achieved fame for their work and very specific style, but the windows that were created probably demonstrate the “Arts and Crafts” movement as Westerners might expect to find it. While early work was almost exclusively for ecclesiastical use, the studio combined its skills with the woodwork studio to produce some exceptional pieces of Arts and Crafts furniture incorporating glazed panels.

The triptych glass panel in the header image for this article miraculously escaped destruction in the Cultural Revolution. It was commissioned from T’ou Se We for the Ruijin Hotel in Shanghai and also demonstrates how the stained glass and metalwork workshops interacted.

In December 2012, a rare example of T’ou Se We silver work appeared in auction in America. The 4-piece tea and coffee set and matching tray weighing some 4200gm is thought to be dated circa 1915 around the time of the exposition. It is known that silver was displayed at the Chinese pavilion at the expo.

The style is noticeably different from what one might expect from Chinese Export Silver being produced in Shanghai at the time, but it is quite similar to a generic style of silver produced in America, so it could well have been specifically made for the market the expo would expect to visit.

One of the most famous students of the fine art studio was the painter and sculptor Zhang Chong Ren and he unwittingly created probably the most bizarre link between Shanghai and the West.

After Zhang had completed his training at T’ou-Sè Wè it later led him to study art in Brussels, where he met Hergé [Georges Remi], the creator of the comic book character Tintin. Based in Shanghai, the Tintin adventure, The Blue Lotus , was created in close collaboration with Zhang Chong Ren who is immortalised in the figure of the Chinese boy Zhang.

Pictured below is Zhang Chong Ren as a boyish 24 year old taken in Brussels with Georges Remi in 1935. It was there he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts and in 1934 he was introduced to Hergé by Father Gosset who in turn had been contacted by Hergé as he was planning a Tintin storyline in China and wanted it to be factually correct.

Zhang and Hergé found themselves to be very much on the same wavelength and Zheng not only drew all the Chinese ideograms that appeared in the original black and white edition, but became the model for Hergé’s character Tchang.

An early artwork [right] by Zhang based on his own interpretation of his transition from Zhang to Tchang.

Bearing in mind this was executed over 30 years before Andy Warhol created his famous celebrity series, it is both quite uncanny and very much before its time.

Much later, the ex-T’ou Se We master was asked to sculpt an official bust of French President Mitterand.

Hergé’s sympathetic, yet realistic, portrayal of China and the Chinese in the story caused a political storm. The Japanese protested, since the storyline includes the sabotaging of a railway in China that was based on a real incident in 1931 at Mukden in Manchuria which had been occupied by the Japanese after ousting the incumbent Russians. The railway was the South Manchuria Railway.

The local warlord was also called Zhang!

Later, Madame Chiang Kai-Chek invited Hergé to visit China as she was also a painter and enjoyed the visuality of The Blue Lotus as well as the irony of the train incident.

Madame Chiang created work in the traditional Chinese style under her full official name.

She died at the age of 105 in New York, where she lived. At the age of 103 she staged an exhibition of her art. To this day, none of her art is for sale, as she decreed.

She was often referred to as the Last Empress; a title she appreciated since she likened herself to the Empress Dowager Cixi in many ways – both were politicians, both were strong women in a male world who had the art of manipulating heads of state around the world and both were artists.

It is also well-documented that the American painter Katherine Carl had a considerable influence at the T’ou Se We painting school. In 1903 Katherine spent nine months at the Forbidden City in Beijing where she had initially gone for a single sitting that Empress Dowager Cixi had granted her for the portrait of herself she had commissioned; Cixi felt immediately at ease with Katherine. The portrait was eventually finished on a date that had been declared optimally auspicious. The finished picture was a compromise of the traditional official portrait style of the Imperial court and Katherine’s own style that was loosely bordering on impressionism

A split personality of styles was not unusual for acknowledged artists who had gone through the T’ou SeWe art school. The well-known and highly prolific artist Xu Beihong had two definitive style that stood poles apart. He was best known for his semi-traditional horse paintings, but his portraits were wonderfully atmospheric, used a very particular palette and almost always redolent of the age they were painted in.

The method employed much of the time at T’ou Se We to inculcate students with mastering technique was simply to copy. The painting above is known as the “Dong Lu Our Lady of China” and is said to have been used as one of the most used paintings for students to copy. The painting is particularly special since the setting and the robes are based on an official painting of Empress Dowager Cixi herself. The concept of an “Our Lady of China” is an incongruous one. When the Boxer Rebellion finally came to an end, the pastor of Dong Lu, an impoverished missionary settlement near Beijing, managed to “secure” a portrait of the Empress Dowager. He then commissioned an artist to use the actual painting, retaining the background and the Imperial robes. The resulting picture was hung above the altar at Dong Lu. The painting was then adopted as the official image by the Shanghai Synod of Bishops and the church, altar and painting became a shrine. Pope Pius XI approved the shrine as an official Marian shrine. The painting became known as “Our Lady Queen of China”.

The original portrait almost certainly came to be in the possession of the pastor when the Boxers were overpowered and the foreign troops entered the Forbidden City, when some looting took place, albeit relatively minimal. An inventory was carried out when Cixi eventually was able to return to her palace from exile and we know a good number of paintings were missing, as well as porcelain, jade, gold and silver ingots.

T’ou Se We, like many great institutions in China, came to an end with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, but its legacy is only now beginning to be appreciated; a legacy that was a catalyst for dramatic changes in how the creative mind could think out of the traditional box. Although much of the creativity that issued from T’ou Se We still had a discernible traditional Chinese basis, to go beyond the traditional was, in Chinese terms, a huge step for man. T’ou Se We and the Jesuit masters opened the door so the students could see and understand there were many other creative worlds possible. The huge amount of creativity pouring out of China today can trace its roots back to the brake’s being taken off the hitherto constrained creative mind at T’ou Se We.

No better demonstration of this is the work of Liu Haisu. He entered the Jesuit orphanage school at the age of 14 to study landscape painting. He was greatly influenced by Cezanne, van Gogh and Millet and in 1912, along with Wu Shiguang and Zhangyunguang, he opened the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting, the first school of fine arts in modern China.

His multitude of works have a traditional Chinese landscape base that are transformed by colour and an impressionistic flexibility that strictly traditional Chinese painting would not have allowed.

Creativity, according to Confucianism, creates order of logic and aesthetics in an immanental world. This is the legacy of T’ou Sè Wè.

This article is based on Adrien von Ferscht’s most recent research findings and supersedes a previously published article on T’ou Se We he wrote in early 2013

References:

Evangelica Historiae Imagines, Society of Jesus, Antwerp, 1593

Confucius sinarum philosophus, sive, Scientia Sinensis Latine exposita, Apud Danielem Horthemels, 1687 [Boston College University Libraries]

Jesuits at the Court of Peking, Charles Wilfred Allen, Hong Kong, 1935

Biblica Sinica, Henri Cordier, Paris, 1904

Christian Influence upon the Idealogy of the Taiping Rebellion 1851-1864, Eugene Powers Boardman, New York, 1964

Xu Beihong’s Stories are Endless, LianHe ZaoBao

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek – China’s Eternal First Lady, Laura Tyson-Li, New York, 2007

The Last Empress – Madame Chang Kai-Shek and the Birth of Modern China, Hannah Pakula, 2009

The Empress Dowager Cixi – The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, Jung Chang, London, 2014

Acknowledgments:

Shanghai Daily; Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai; Shanghai Xinhong Cultural Development Co.Ltd; Musée Hergé, Belgium; The Hergé Foundation/Moulinsart, Brussels; The Jesuit Collection, Boston College USA; The People’s Collection, Wales; Shanghai Library; New York Times Archive; Our Lady of China Project: The Cardinal Kung Foundation; Singapore Art Museum; Christie’s, New York; Heritage Auctions, Dallas: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; Wellesley College Library Archives; Kaminski Auctions

Danny Cheng, Hong Kong for translations

The People’s Republic of China

Unless specified, all images are from the image archive of Adrien von Ferscht or his associated publications

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