CHINESE EXPORT SILVER AND THE ENLIGHTENED RENAISSANCE   中國出口銀器: 被啟蒙的文藝復興

Chinese Export Silver always adapted to the realities of Chinese history; it was, after all, a product of that history,as such, it has qualities that no other silver category possesses. Viewed in the overall context of China, it is an excellent indicator of prevailing historical events at any given time; events that were many and fast-moving, particularly in the latter part of the 19th century.

That a de-facto ruler of the largest nation on earth could, in 47 years, transform an effectively medieval society into a modern 20th century state is extraordinary in itself. The fact she was a semi-literate woman in a totally man’s world is exceptional. 47 years of the Empress Dowager Cixi at the helm dispensed with centuries-old customs, most steeped in ancestral superstition and confined within the boundaries set by Confucianism. Minds were prised open and this was quickly reflected in all the creative arts as well as in revolutionary changes in merchant trading. For Chinese Export Silver, it meant a move away from its former traditional centre, Canton, to Hong Kong and Shanghai as well as other treaty ports. Previous vassal states such as Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia and Formosa began to create silver that became increasingly divorced from the Chinese style.

Looking at the picture above, it would be difficult for most people to imagine that this somewhat otherworldly woman was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing China into the modern world. For this is the Empress Dowager Cixi, born in 1835, her father an ordinary Manchu official, she entered the Imperial court in 1852 as a concubine and was elevated incrementally to the rank of Virtuous Honourable Concubine. She was not particularly well educated, being able to read but initially barely able to write and she lived her life according to traditional values; a fact that often presented her with a dilemma when she had become determined to modernise China while trying to ensure the Manchu Qing Dynasty remained intact.

For centuries, China had consistently been ahead of the West in so many ways, yet its insistence to adopt an introspective stance by almost virtually hermetically sealing its borders to foreigners did have negative effects; that, and a mindset deeply weighed down by ingrained tradition and superstition.

The Sung Dynasty [960-1279CE] is often referred to as a Chinese Renaissance, with a vast array of inventions and discoveries occurring that preceded later Western parallels that also claimed to be the first highly sophisticated technological advances, but were to have a profound effect on the Chinese people and civilisation as a whole. But as much as China was introspective, Europe was Europe-centric and the European inventions of the nautical compass [1112CE], firearms [1810CE] and the printing press [1448CE] were in existence in China long before; each other’s self-absorption creating parallel worlds that were oblivious to an egocentric world-view that placed all foreign countries equally into a single group, with China being superior and an intermediary between them and heaven. As the Celestial Empire, China had also evolved a diplomatic tradition that held great store in tributes and placed trade as being almost inconsequential that to foreign nations was perplexing in varying degrees but to which they applied themselves, resulting in varying degrees of understanding.

A typical 16th century Portuguese “Caravel” sailing ship

The Chinese tributary system dates back to the Han Dynasty [206BCE-220CE] and was a product of a totally sino-centric concept borne out of its belief of it being superior to all others’ inferiority. China had always viewed the world in this uniquely self-obsessed way that in reality tended to create highly complex and intricate systems and procedures that foreigners were expected to follow. Fundamentally the tributary system was a self-preservation mechanism that was perfectly logical to the Chinese and somewhat baffling to non-Chinese. It aimed to successfully manage and regulate trade by first being confirmed as the “centre of the universe” by a “tribute” mission being granted an audience at court at which the ke-tou [kowtow] ritual was performed which in turn led to a proclamation of the precise period trading and foreign relations would be allowed. A series of formal exchanges of gifts that accompanied less formal, but nevertheless regulated, under-the-table exchanges was an “expectation”; an obstacle course, if you will, to test the endurance and compliance of a prospective trading partner that earned points according to Chinese rules and expectations. This was a system that was approaching being 2000 years old by the time the Portuguese arrived – a system prescribed by Confucianism and the “Mandate of Heaven”, with customs that had not really changed and would not change significantly until it collapsed in the mid 19th century. As with most Imperial court procedures, they appeared archaic and otherworldly, which is exactly what they were.

Digressing, Chinese Export Silver is an excellent indicator of both the Chinese mindset and the effect China had on the rest of the world as a result of that mindset at any given time in history. The Empress Dowager was born into a world where the Canton System of trade dominated, which in turn was China’s remedy for regulating foreign presence and trade in China. The reality of the system, with the benefit of hindsight, could be viewed as the most chaotic ever devised; some would even question whether the word “system” is wholly appropriate. Whereas Chinese Mandarins were highly skilled at creating a set of rules for any given situation, the Chinese merchant hierarchy, itself highly complex and convoluted, would by nature create a viable and logical solution to absolve themselves. The foreign merchants of the Canton System would comply, each in their own way and according to their own national logic, adding to the overall confusion but more often than not resulting in satisfactory transactions. The circumvention of the Canton System was effectively a game of Snakes & Ladders, enjoyed by the players but hated by the Mandarins and the Imperial court.

In the world of Chinese Export Silver, when the Empress Dowager was a small child it mainly took the form of high quality silver in the neo-classical style that was prevalent in Britain and America of which this circa 1840 tea urn [left] by the Canton retail silversmith Khecheong admirably shows.

At the time this urn was made, the Emperor Dao-guang [Taou-Kwang] was on the Imperial throne and China was in political turmoil. The first Opium War was about to be waged and not long afterwards was to follow the Taiping Rebellion. Trade in Canton continued, albeit sometimes under duress, while foreign merchants were tasked with executing special orders from Canton silversmiths to produce high quality items to rival those being made in London, Boston and New York but at a fraction of the cost of producing them in those cities. Foreign trade was strictly contained with an area less than half a square mile.

While China’s age of renaissance was waning, in Europe it was commencing; the Ming Dynasty closed China’s doors while European nations caught up on lost years.  By the early 16th century Portuguese ships sailed into the Chinese world; a world in whose eyes China believed it was by divine right the centrifugal force, with an Emperor who was directly mandated by heaven.

The Emperor  Daoguang reviewing his troops at The Forbidden City 1843

This was a reign of growing discontentment of the people due to gross embezzlement by officials of already fast-depleting funds spent on trying to deal with a succession of floods and famine. The Emperor chose austerity as his own lifestyle while his officials did not know the meaning of the word, let alone the concept. By the time Dao-guang died in 1850, he left a China that was fast in decline, in chaos politically from the overly convoluted in-fighting within the court and a China that was light years behind prospering Western nations and its relatively tiny neighbour Japan; the Industrial Revolution was to pass China by.

By decree, he was succeeded by his fourth son Xianfeng [real name, Yizhu] at the age of 19. His chosen Imperial name means “universal prosperity” and this could not have been further from the reality China found itself in.  Xianfeng’s reign began with a series of rebellions within China, beginning with the Taiping Rebellion. There was also increasing pressure from outside China that culminated in the so-called Second Opium War involving the British Empire and the Second French Empire against the Qing Dynasty in 1856 that was to last four years. The war was devastating for China, resulting in a series of treaties that ceded further ports to foreign trade, made the trading of opium  legal, gave equal rights to Christians and a right to evangelise, ceded Kowloon to the British and culminated with a siege of Beijing and the burning and looting of the Summer Palace and the Old Summer Palace ordered by Lord Elgin. The Chinese were made to pay 8 million taels [equivalent to $208 million in today’s values] compensation to France and Britain.  Xianfeng and his court had fled to the Imperial Summer palace in the mountains of Hebei Province at Chengde.

The 18th century Rehe Palace Resort at Chengde, Hebei Province

Xianfeng died in 1861 at the Imperial Summer Palace, having been left a broken man as a result of his disastrous decisions and his being totally removed from reality. His 6 year old son Zaichun succeeded him, with an 8 person Regency Council to rule until Zaichun was of age to take the throne. More importantly, Cixi was made Empress Dowager, Zaichun being her birth son. The former Empress, was also made Dowager Empress Ci’an, even though she was childless; the new Emperor took the regnal name of The Tongzhi Emperor, meaning “restoring order together” which turned out to be ironically apt.

Empress Dowager Ci’an [left] & Empress Dowager Cixi [right]

Despite previous animosity between Ci’an and Cixi prior to this, Cixi quickly took the initiative and hurried back to the Forbidden City in Beijing with the sole intent to stage a palace coup that would replace the 8 man Regency Council with the two Dowager Empresses and Prince Gong, the new Emperor’s uncle. This is the first time we really see Cixi’s genius of strategy at play, for not only did she manage to get Ci’an to fully cooperate, but they were to actually have a close relationship from then onwards with Cixi being the  engine powering the throne.

Albeit she was Regent, Empress Dowager Cixi was the antithesis of every ruler that had preceded her; “Make China Strong” [zi-qiang] through institutional and social reform and adopting the modern world instead of allowing Confucianism to rule the mind was her mantra. Not only was she a woman in a patriarchy, but such an agenda was tantamount to being sacrilege in the minds of the court with its ancient ways; such was the challenge Cixi set herself – and China.

China now enters a transition period and this is reflected in Chinese Export Silver. The hitherto predominant neo-classicism almost disappears overnight and there’s a swing to applying what are essentially traditional Chinese decorative motifs to silver items that are not particularly Chinese in concept but that have been created in the “Chinese style”. This goblet [below] is by the Canton retail silversmith Cutshing and carries an inscription with the date 1863, which puts it two years into the new de facto reign of Cixi.

The inscription is very telling of the times:

Presented to Dr J R Carmichael

by his patients & friends on his departure from

Canton to Chefoo

February 1863

Chefoo [Zhifou], Shandong Province in 1861 became an international trading port for Great Britain and 16 other trading nations. From being a backwater historic town, it suddenly became yet another focal point for international trade, the reason why Dr Carmichael was relocating from Canton, the original treaty port in China. This otherwise seemingly insignificant goblet is indicative of quite meteoric changes happening in China in the early 1860’s related to foreign trade and trading rights and indicative of the nibbling into China’s coastline by foreign powers.

Despite the fact that the international community chose to conveniently disregard the integrity of China as a sovereign state, the original five treaty ports and how they were thriving since their creation presented Cixi with a blueprint. She was cognizant of what had happened in the first twenty years of Hong Kong being ceded to the British. She knew that China had to open it’s doors to foreign trade, understanding that China could benefit from the excise revenues, being well aware that in just two months, the port of Shanghai had collected over 800,000 taels [almost $21 million in today’s values] in import duty alone. She also knew that implementing an effective customs regime and the collection of taxes could not be trusted to just anyone from the Chinese court if she wanted the proceeds to remain intact – for centuries the traditional system of the “squeeze” [skimming off the top] was invoked at all stages of any transaction, including tax  collecting. Cixi took the unprecedented step of confirming an Irishman, Sir Robert Hart, as Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Custom Service.

Hart was to transform the antiquated and corruption-riven Chinese Customs into a slick revenue-delivering machine that allowed China to fully pay off the indemnities it owed France and Great Britain from the Treaty of Tientsin. It was a tremendously courageous move to have taken and Cixi remained resolute despite the animosity it caused within the Chinese civil service. Hart remained in office until 1866 and on relinquishing his position he handed Cixi his advice for the next step of her reforms, which included the introduction of countrywide telegraphic system, railroad systems and modern mining methods; all situations presenting the more traditional Chinese with the dilemma of disrupting the geomancy [feng shui] and the ancestral burial sites. Hart had estimated the Chinese coal fields to be probably twenty times greater than the entire continent of Europe.

The transformation of Shanghai to a treaty port had a similar impact to the already established silver making tradition in the city. As with Canton, Shanghai had a core element of silversmiths, some of whom  dated back to the 18th century, since silver making was very much a traditional dynastic family artisan trade; the oldest known silversmith being Lao Qing Yun. What was particularly interesting was to see how some of the established makers were themselves in a transition, creating silver for the traditional “home market” as well as for the burgeoning export trade. These makers, many of whom were retail silversmiths, were slowly joined by new names as the resident international community in Shanghai and the export trades grew.

This superb and rare cup and saucer [above] is particularly interesting since it is clearly inspired by Tang silver from almost 1200 years previous, as the illustration of a tang silver gilt cup, circa 700CE] [below] shows. It is difficult to accurately date this piece, but circa 1870-80 is probably right and it was made for the Shanghai retail silversmith Bao Cheng, one of a core group of silversmiths operating there known as “the nine factories”, but what makes it even more interesting is shown in the silver mark which tells us this is Bao Cheng Yue Ji, a branch of the established Bao Cheng dynasty. An expansion of a retail silversmith demonstrates that Shanghai was sufficiently booming to warrant it.

There are those that make comparison between the Empress Dowager and Queen Victoria, yet it is hardly a worthy comparison other than the two were obviously women leaders in a man’s world. Victoria, unlike Cixi, had a government that made the decisions; Victoria was the figurehead of a government on an unstoppable empire-building spree, while Cixi was both figurehead and strategist endeavouring to stop Victoria’s government from destroying the integrity of China as a nation state and an empire in its own right. Britain was not alone in her global expansion aspirations; Germany, Japan, Russia, France and  the United States were all clamouring at the same door.

It is also important to remember that at this point in time, there were several countries bordering on China that were effectively vassal states; Vietnam, Korea, Siam [Thailand], Tibet, Burma, Formosa [Taiwan], Bhutan and Nepal etc. Foreign powers tended to see these territories as easy-pickings and Cixi had to make decisions that were often hard to swallow, often to simply allow these states to become detached and in doing so allow foreign powers to have a presence on China’s borders; Keeping the integrity of China-proper intact was the priority.

In silver making terms, there was a majority presence of Chinese silversmiths in many of these countries, which in itself creates a dilemma for us today to determine whether the silver created by them was Chinese or, say, Vietnamese. Silver created in Mongolia at this time would as likely to be considered as much Chinese as Mongolian, if created by a Chinese silversmith operating a workshop there; a dilemma that is further complicated by the fact that many of these “Chinese” makers remained after these states became colonies of either Western powers or Japan.

In Hong Kong, where the population was heading for 250,000 that had sprung from a virtually insignificant fishing village of a few thousand only 40 years previous, many of the merchant-based companies that had previously been active in Canton and the East India trade along with numerous newcomers were thriving at an unprecedented rate. The combination of prosperity and a large international community attracted a significant number of the Canton silversmiths to the island; this was reflected in a more commercial style of silver that found a synergy between Chinese decorative motifs on objects that were more suited to a Western lifestyle. Some might call it a fantasy version of the Chinese style, since silversmiths and their silver were still ingrained with the traditional allegorical meanings of these motifs that, in the main, went over the heads of most buyers; to a Westerner it was simply exotic. 

Hong Kong’s new-found prosperity coincided with a general upsurge in wealth and the growth of the middle classes in Europe and America and, somewhat perversely, the awareness overseas of what was happening in China created a Victorian renaissance of the Chinese style and all things “chinoiserie”. Retail silversmiths such as Wang Hing & Company literally did a roaring trade in creating trophies for the many clubs and institutions that were being founded in Hong Kong, in fact the island was becoming the epitome of a colonial city that all those nibbling at China’s coastline were hoping to  replicate.

Although this presentation trophy [left] is dated slightly later at 1891, it is nevertheless typical of items appearing in Hong Kong from 1860’s onwards.

Decorated with prolific traditional Chinese scenes and dreams that have been imposed upon a trophy in the neo-classical high Victorian style and bears the engraved legend:

Racquet Handicap Hong Kong 1891

     Won by

      E.H.Grafton [Scratch]

The exuberant Chinese style applied to a very Western object is yet again reflecting the various phenomena that were happening on the ground in China and Hong Kong as history was unfolding.

The momentum of expansion in Hong Kong was markedly different from mainland China treaty ports. Hong Kong, by definition, had sovereignty over its own destiny, whereas the treaty ports were enclaves within the confines of a total Chinese authority, albeit a “new order” of things. The expansion of both Hong Kong and Shanghai as international trading centres had a detrimental effect on Canton. Not only were Chinese merchants relocating to Hong Kong, in particular, but the previously strong bonds that had existed between Chinese merchants, the old Hong merchant hierarchy and the British merchants [the vast majority of whom were actually Scottish] also transferred to the island; these being additionally bolstered by the Indian Jewish [Mizrachi]mercantile clans moving their families. operations and investments there.

Yet this Wang Hing trophy goblet [left] clearly shows there is still a semi-colonial lifestyle intact at Canton in 1889. The inscription on the cup reads:

In 1874, Cixi’s son died of smallpox. Earlier the same year, the Emperor had dismissed the two regents Prince Gong and Prince Chun over their objection to his plan to rebuild the Old Summer Palace at a time when the empire was near bankruptcy. Both Empress Dowagers had intervened and he was forced to reinstate them. Although he died childless, it was generally believed his Empress was pregnant, but Cixi, realising this was a crucial time for China to survive, she declared her nephew Prince Zaitien,  the three year old son of Prince Chun, Emperor; Cixi and Ci’an were the sole Regents in a non-written pact that would allow Cixi to be de-facto ruler and, both bizarrely and strategically, Cixi adopted the new Emperor. Cixi’s daughter-in-law died a few months later; a new era of ruling China was born under the new Emperor’s regnal name Guangxu. Even more bizarrely, Guangzu was encouraged to address Cixi as “Papa dearest”, which he continued to do until her passing over 30 years hence.

The Three Year Old Emperor Guangzu

History has generally not been particularly kind to Cixi, having been vilified by many historians as having been self-centred and a wanton spendthrift, some of which could be construed as being true if taken out of context. The same could be said for her counterpart Queen Victoria who, in the height of the dire poverty of the mid 19th century built Osborne House and Balmoral Castle as private residencies, but finding a historian that actually says that is rare. Unlike Victoria, Cixi was single-handedly fighting for the very existence and integrity of China as a nation, while Victoria [or her government] was expanding hers at the expense of others.

Cixi was to effectively rule for the next 15 years, but from the start she knew that time was of the essence if she was to optimally accelerate her vision for China’s modernisation. She turned to Li Hongzhang who had already distinguished himself by demonstrating several times he was a world-class statesman and diplomat and, most importantly, one who was respected not only by the West but by neighbouring Japan and Russia. Cixi’s choice of Li was to put China on the international stage for the first time, not as a puppet but as a highly respected diplomat who meant business. For his life’s work, Queen Victoria conferred Li with a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; an award that was heartfelt rather than driven by some cunning sycophantic strategy. 

Cixi’s first diplomatic move was to appoint Guo Songtao as her minister to London, his main task being to learn how the British were so successful at governing. Guo was soon to report back that not only were the British “courteous” but he intimated that China’s 2000 year old Imperial system was not as desirable as the British parliamentary monarchical system. As it transpired, Guo was not entirely a satisfactory choice but his initial observation were something Cixi embraced wholeheartedly.

Li Hongzhang with Otto von Bismarck in Friedrichsruh, the Bismarck Manor House in the Sachenswald Forest, Northern Germany, 1896

Also in 1875, Robert Hart, Cixi requested of Robert Hart to draw up a manifesto for a wholesale expansion of foreign trade and the industrialisation of China. Her mantra “Make China Strong” was given a second addition “Make the Chinese Rich” and she was adamant the latter could only be attained by creating Western-style industrial projects. This was from a woman who had never left China to the point of rarely leaving the confines of the Forbidden City and whose life was until now governed by the archaic court protocols that were brought to Beijing in the 17th century at the onset of the Manchu Dynasty.

All this should be taken within the context of China never previously having acknowledged a need for a Ministry of Foreign Affairs since, as a concept, foreign affairs was anathema to a nation that believed it was mandated by heaven.

The revolutionary changes came fast and furious from Cixi’s mind and spewed out into her court where officials who were totally unused to such radicalism were badgered into first understanding her plans and edicts and then pressed upon to implement them effectively; the sheer volume was staggering.

In 1875 a programme of modern coal mining was begun and the domino effect of this was the introduction of electricity. No government that had so recently come so close to bankruptcy could contemplate funding such ambitious schemes on a scale a land mass the size of  China demanded, so Cixi encouraged entrepreneurs to invest and even allowed them to issue shares to raise capital. This, in turn, began to generate a new phenomenon in China – a middle class.

 The extraordinary sight of wives of the American legation in Beijing with the Empress Dowager Cixi, Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister to China holding Cixi’s hand. Previously, women not of the Imperial family  or their consorts were forbidden to enter the Forbidden City, let alone foreign women!

It was as if China had been shaken vigorously by the shoulders and it had woken up after centuries of virtual hibernation. The focus of the modern world now centred on China, creating their own trade and maritime initiatives, not all of the latter necessarily with peaceful intent.

The tazza [below] was created by Wang Hing & Company, probably from their now prospering Hong Kong base. Once again a somewhat theatrical and fanciful notion of “the oriental” has been applied to an object that is as far from Chinese culture as one could get, yet Wang Hing, which was known for strictly controlling design and quality, still took the trouble to adhere to the allegorical symbolism of the decorative motifs employed. The object carries the following inscription:

Foley C.P. Vereker R N 

from his Shipmates

H.M.S. Rambler 1885

The ship HMS Rambler was launched in 1880 at John Elder & Co., shipbuilders in Glasgow. The ship was ostensibly a survey vessel but was fitted out as a fully rigged gun vessel and in 1885 joined the China Station which was then based at Hong Kong but would eventually relocate to Weihaiwei on the China mainland. HMS rambler was typical of a vast convergence of maritime activity that all the “interested” foreign nations brought to the waters around China, in the form of both naval and merchant shipping al all sizes. This, in turn, generated a vast upturn in the economies of all the participating countries including Hong Kong and China itself.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, the fact that Cixi had just 15 years to totally change a nation that accounted for one quarter of the population of the world at the time would be unthinkable for any nation to contemplate today. Even had it been relatively plain sailing, the task she chose borders on the incomprehensible, but plain sailing is not what Cixi was presented with. She encountered fierce opposition from within the court, yet she remained resolute and pragmatic. If that was not enough, she was beset with full scale rebellions, the most challenging, apart from a humiliating Japanese invasion, being the so-called Boxer rebellion. Faced with the dilemma of foreign armies on Chinese territory fighting the same enemy and safeguarding the integrity of China’s borders and its sovereignty of the people and landmass within them caused her to choose to be seen to side with the Boxers rebels by giving them legal status; her decision based on the premise that it was the lesser of two evils and one she could deal with once the foreign powers were defeated. It was a bold choice given the Boxers were intent on overthrowing the Manchu Dynasty and her plan did not develop as she had planned; the final Battle of Peking – the 55 day siege of the international legation in Beijing ended in defeat for the Boxers and the combined international forces going on the rampage in the city causing widespread damage. 

The eventual peace agreement between the Eight-Nation Alliance and Cixi’s representatives were to cost China over $4 billion [in today’s values] plus interest over 39 years as indemnity payments. Cixi, who had fled the Imperial City at the last minute dressed as a peasant women and on a wooden box cart returned to Beijing both broken and fire up with renewed energy to escalate the transformation of China. She knew she was an old woman, the Emperor had to be seen to be ruling, yet she was very much the back seat driver sat firmly at the front – technically, she had retired.

For the various foreign nations now trading from China from their various international enclaves that were governed each according to their respective national laws, the start of the 20th century was as if an invisible brake had been release. Living in unprecedented luxury that they could only have dreamt of in their home countries, the merchants and entrepreneurs had the sole focus of making as much moneys they could as quickly as possible. 

Shanghai entered a new phase of its history which transformed it to the London, New York and Chicago of the East with the added licentiousness of Berlin. Many Chinese merchants became wealthy or wealthier; many chose to live in the international sectors too and adopted totally Western lifestyles, including the decadence that had almost become an unofficial trademark of the city. This new “Chinese Jazz Age” was very much reflected in the Chinese Export Silver that flowed out of Shanghai, not to forget the Westernisation of traditional Chinese dress becoming the fashion statement in every large city in the West, epitomised by Madame Chiang, wife of Chiang Kai-Shek, who was well on the way to becoming an international style icon.

Decadence was borne out of prosperity, which in turn generated more decadence and even more prosperity; a pattern that was repeated in major world cities. This caused a noticeable increase in the amount of silver being produced for both the indigenous home markets and those overseas. Equally, there was a palpable change in the style of silver being produced as well as new objects that were themselves products of the “Jazz Age”. The swing-handle reticulated basket by the Shanghai retail silversmith Hung Chong demonstrates this new fusion of the Chinese style and a more modern styled object, while retaining the quality. This basket could not be European or American; it is Chinese of sorts, but a Chinese style not seen before.

If one object could encapsulate this early 20th century decadence, the cocktail shaker does it admirably. This 14-piece cocktail set carries the mark of C.J. Co. [aka China Jewelry Company], one of the many new retail silversmiths servicing the affluent Shanghainese. The glasses are particularly interesting since they appear to be torn between traditional Chinese motifs in their reticulated silver conical cups, but they also have glass liners that appear to be forerunners of the dry Martini glasses we are familiar with today. Martini & Rossi first began marketing their 50/50 mix of Old Tom Gin and vermouth mix as far back as 1863, but the dry Martini as a cocktail has a conflicting origin. In 1911, the bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York claims to have invented it, however the town of Martinez in San Francisco Bay claims to have been serving the “Martinez” as early as 1849; the drink was then gentrified into a “Martini”, complete with olive in the main gold-rush city of San Francisco [population 25,000] – both seem to be plausible cocktail tales.

Shanghai and Hong Kong at the beginning of the 20th century were parallel cities, both expanding rapidly and both major international trading ports generating vast wealth. Equally, the city that had been the forerunner of both, Canton, while losing its position and raison d’être as an international trading city was becoming the city of revolutionaries. Canton was very much a city in transition, yet it was doing so in an atmosphere of turmoil brought about by a succession of men returning from sojourns in America and Britain, many of them returning as newly converted Christians and most of them with revolutionary ideas for a dynastic-free state steeped in left-wing communist, Bolshevik or socialist ideals. This quickly filtered through to the worker-levels and Canton was plagued by literally hundreds of unions, one superseding the other in rapid succession and almost always exploiting the actual workers who were pouring into Canton in great numbers. The exploitation fuelled wealth; the exploiters invested the wealth into a massive replanting of the city that included the development of the Bund as we know it today as well as a city-wide rickshaw system – unionised, of course. Canton, for the first 11 years of the 20th century was the incubator from which would emerge not only the first republic, but also successive leaders, almost all of whom had studied in the West and many at Christian Methodist and Wesleyan institutions.

The three cities did have one phenomenon in common, the relative emancipation of Chinese women – or at least the more affluent ones. Interestingly, nearby Yokohama in Japan was evolving in a similar way and was generally easily accessible to south Chinese cities.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, with all the vision and drive Cixi possessed, she seemed to fail in factoring into her main equation for the modernisation of China that by almost certain default, such an initiative would not only engender teething troubles, but it would also engender revolutionary extremists simply by dint of fact peoples’ minds were opening to a whole new world. As far as history shows, she gave no signs of recognising this and it could well be due to the fact she had never ever seen the Western world; she could only envision it from what she was told and from the very few Westerners she came into contact with.

Style and extreme wealth, however, became ubiquitous of early 20th century Shanghai and Hong Kong, each developing its own recognisable versions of this strange melange of colonialism and the nouveau riche. 1905 Hong Kong and Shanghai were far advanced of the development of Canton, which had begun to fall prey to the pressures of political unrest. Cixi had never ever seen these three cities!

Des Veoux Road, Hong Kong, 1904 and the new tram system

 The Bund, Shanghai and The British Club [left]

The combined cosmopolitan Shanghai and Hong Kong clientele influenced the Chinese retail silversmiths to create what were “cutting edge” designs of the day, such as this “Arts & Crafts” influenced inkwell by Shanghai-based Hung Chong & Company or the Art Nouveau inspired picture frame by Wang Hing & Co.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, with all the vision and drive Cixi possessed, she seemed to fail in factoring into her main equation for the modernisation of China that by almost certain default, such an initiative would not only engender teething troubles, but it would also engender revolutionary extremists simply by dint of fact peoples’ minds were opening to a whole new world. As far as history shows, she gave no signs of recognising this and it could well be due to the fact she had never ever seen the Western world; she could only envision it from what she was told and from the very few Westerners she came into contact with.

Style and extreme wealth, however, became ubiquitous of early 20th century Shanghai and Hong Kong, each developing its own recognisable versions of this strange melange of colonialism and the nouveau riche. 1905 Hong Kong and Shanghai were already far advanced of the development of Canton, which had begun to fall prey to the pressures of political unrest.

Quite what the Empress Dowager would have made of this can never be known, and certainly it was not part of her original master plan or vision. Just as Cixi had found it logical to form an alliance with the Boxers, perhaps she would have seen a logic in doing the same with the triads. It may even have worked, had she been in the driving seat. Certainly there are modern-day equivalents in the world today that have had varying degrees of effectiveness. One thing is a given though, dramatic social changes will always manifest themselves in the ever-evolving style of the day; silver items are a perfect thermometer to gauge social history retrospectively. Given the years of Cixi’s reign in China and the years leading to the formation of the Republic and the two decades afterwards are so packed with tumultuous events that fast-tracked Chinese society into a world that even Cixi probably could not have imagined, Chinese Export Silver of that period speaks volumes. Cixi’s legacy was the releasing of the centuries-old brakes on creativity in all its forms and a China that was on the road to modernity, albeit a rocky one.

Cixi left China in style, as she had lived it. Her funeral demonstrated a level of popularity with the people that even she would have been surprised at.

A lasting image of that style is surely her hands – incredibly long finger extensions in exquisite filigree silver and gold encrusted with jewels, her neck always cascading with pearls.

References:

Encyclopaedia Brittanica

Vanity Fair, 27 December 1894 edition

Empress Dowager Cixi, Jung Chang, 2014
The Much Maligned Empress Dowager: A Revisionist Study of the Empress Dowager Tz’u-Hsi (1835–1908), Sue Fawn Chung, 1979
Dragon Lady: the Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China , Keith Laidler, 2003
Memoirs of Li Hung Chang, William Francis Mannix, 1913
Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912), Arthur William Hummel, 1943
Li Hung-Chang and China’s Early Modernisation, Samuel C Chu & Kwang-Ching Liu, 1994
The War of the Dragon Lady; John Wilcox, 2012
Chinese Anti-Foreignism & the Boxer Rebellion, L.R. Marchant, 1970

Acknowledgments:

Artfact; Palace Museum, Beijing; Danny Cheng, Hong Kong; Editorial Department of the Palace Museum, Beijing; HistoryOrb.com;  Library of Congress Geography & Map Division, Washington DC; Alain Truong @ CanalBlog; Institute of South East Asian Studies, Singapore; RightSite.asia | Yantai; Shanghai Museum; Shanghai Library

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 and/or research papers

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© 2014, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

The post CHINESE EXPORT SILVER & THE ENLIGHTENED RENAISSANCE 中國出口銀器: 被啟蒙的文藝復興 appeared first on chinese export silver.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE TRIADS ON THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN CHINA 

三合會對中國和香港的裝飾藝術之影響

Style, the demand for style and the supply of style is an extremely fine-tuned, complex equation that only requires a small weakness in one element and the equation is compromised. Style icons are also an essential factor in creating a momentum for style to evolve. 

In the context of early 20th century China and Hong Kong, this was a period of tumultuous change. Beneath the hood of the engine that powered the creation of wealth in such vast quantities in a relatively short space of time were the Triads. In China they were highly visible, while in Hong Kong they were an enigmatic presence. Many of the charismatic Chinese political leaders and style icons of the time were indirect products of the Triads or the Triads were their lifeline.

The decorative arts of the time reflected a new brashness and identity, so one can say without exaggeration that the Triads wielded a considerable influence on what are now relics of those heady times and somewhat notorious cities.

The very concept of Triads having any influence on the decorative arts would appear incongruous to most people; it is nevertheless a reality that had considerable momentum in the late 19th century and early 20th century. To fully comprehend it as a phenomenon, one first has to understand the original concept of the Triads and then trace its evolution, probably proving along the way that a leopard is capable of changing its spots.

In the 21st century the term “Triads”, taken within the general context of China but through Western eyes, would almost certainly conjure up an image of organised crime and violence, with possibly a degree of martial arts thrown in for good measure. To define the term accurately is probably nigh impossible since its evolution during a period spanning well over three centuries has caused changes and distortions that render the original notion unrecognisable. To define the term in simplistic terms is in itself somewhat of an oxymoron for it is best imagined as layers of swirling mist; each layer being a stratum of either supernatural, religious or secular beliefs and goals that somehow come together to form an organisation of singular intent, brotherhood being its catalyst  - yet it is a fraternity that is very much hierarchical that in itself tends to cause dissonance. 

Probably the nearest equivalent in Western culture would be Freemasonry, but just as freemasonry means different things to all those who join, the same can be said for the Triads, or at least their original intention; coercion has been a highly probable factor of the latter since the mid-19th century and one would at least hope it was generally absent from the former.

The term “Triad” is a relatively modern English term that endeavours to describe the sacred symbol of the Chinese secret societies, a triangle surrounding a secret sign that is derived from the Chinese character hung [above], depicting a union of heaven, earth and man. The use of hung stems from Hung Wu [below], the royal title of the patriot Zhu Yuanzhang who founded the Ming Dynasty in 1368 CE. Hung Wu’s reign heralded a golden age of prosperity in China that was ended by the Manchu conquest in 1644. The ensuing Qing Dynasty caused the formation of principles behind the notion of the Triad.

In the 17th century, the Chinese triad society [Hung  Mun] was also known as Tien Tei We [Heaven & Earth Society] or San Hwo Hui  [Three United Society] in the early 19th century; all were very much a product of Southern China. Its main purpose for existing was to overthrow the new Qing Dynasty; the Manchu were seen by the majority Han people as foreigners. With a strong patriotic dogma, the Triad maintained an iron control over its blood brother members, imposing high expectations of total loyalty and righteousness. In its early purest form, the Triad maintained secrecy and its cultural integrity as well as its ceremonial paraphernalia, methods of recruitment, rituals, initiation ceremonial, sense of charity and welfare, secret codes and mode communication. In this respect, the Triad was an Eastern parallel of Western Freemasonry, but unlike the latter the Triads’ main purpose for being was to reinstate the Ming Dynasty; it also had little in common with the concept of “trinity” found in Gnosticism and Platonism – the biblical trinity is not a triad.

The integrity of the original concept remained from its inception through to the 19th century when Triads began to appear that derived income from exacting so-called protection money from peasant farmers, even formalising it by issuing receipts. In just 100 years, the populations of many of the southern China provinces doubled, greatly accelerating after the First Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. As the population expanded, so the Triads proliferated; Triads fast became expert at seeking to thrive from any weak link in society or from insurrection. Any attempt by the Qing court to counteract insurgency was futile and this only resulted in politicising the Triads.

During this period, Triads tended to operate and proliferate in rural areas where government control was particularly weak. Large cities as well as areas that were centred around a particular artisanal industry tended to be Triad-free; there is no evidence of Triads operating in Jingdezhen, the centre of the porcelain industry, for example. Also in this period, Triad leaders tended to be uneducated or poor men from the lower strata of Chinese society; pedlars, soldiers, paupers, shopkeepers, impoverished scholars etc. The only exception to this rule were certain factions of the Heaven and Earth Society that were formed from a hierarchical lineage. What was common to all forms of Triads was the concept of “righteousness” and “brotherhood”, however the latter could often become in conflict with the former when a brother’s duty was to help another brother evade the rule of law; in Triad terms a man could only become a man of integrity through righteousness, the interpretation of which placed duty to one’s brother above duty to the law and the land. Since the vast majority of Triad members were illiterate and almost all the dogma of each Triad faction was embodied in text, the interpretation and spreading of that dogma was in the hands of the literate few who tended to seize upon the advantage they had through exaggerated theatricality. The disaffected majority were often in awe of the few; a trait that was to be repeated several times in history in the 20th century in Europe.

Of the known 96 Triads that existed in Southern China in the late 18th/early 19th century, 39 existed solely for the purpose of looting other people’s homes, 26 for mutual “protection” in “emergencies”, 15 simply for collecting initiation fees, 11 for plundering in towns, villages and cities and 5 for helping to resist arrest and to participate in communal protest. 

It is only in the late 19th century, when the early signs of an inevitable fall of the Qing Dynasty began to appear as a result of a succession of rebellions and general unrest, an evolutionary process began and quickly gained momentum resulting in militant and criminal elements to flourish, still under the guise of the Triad. It is only now that Triads began to display a desire to acquire political power.

That an essentially destructive construct could be presented as having the capability to provide a stable foundation for a new era of Chinese decorative arts is not as bizarre as it sounds; it is simply a matter of fact, albeit unforeseen, borne out of the fast-moving and cataclysmic period in China’s history in the early 20th century. That said, the decorative arts was far from the minds of this new age of Triad leaders and their followers, any influence that was brought to bear was unplanned and symptomatic of the chaos, violence, crime and megalomania that came to plague Chinese society.

It wasn’t until the last years of the 19th century that a highly incongruous union occurred between a Cantonese Christian convert and 3000 Triad members in Hong Kong. Born in Guangdong in 1866, Sun Wen underwent conversion and was baptised in 1884 in Hong Kong, having been educated in a succession of Christian schools including one in Hawaii; Sun Wen eventually took on an honorific name by which we all now know him as, Sun Yat-Sen, the father of the eventual first republic of China in 1911.

That Sun Yat-Sen, a devout Christian, was to be supported by his Christian pastors and friends in Hawaii and Hong Kong his entire life is in itself not particularly surprising, but that this support continued when Sun laid the foundations of his conspiracy for an uprising in Canton against the Manchu regime, it did so under a cloud of incongruity, particularly since it was a revolt that could only be achieved in tandem with Triads.

The Qing government became aware of the plot and it was the Christian involvement they most feared since it reminded them of Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion; the man who believed he was the brother of Jesus and who successfully founded pockets of the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom” in Southern China with himself installed as “Heavenly King”. Hong Xiguan was his own worst enemy and it was his brutality wrought in the name of his religious fantasy on hundreds of thousands of Chinese people that eventually caused his own troops to rebel. He eventually committed suicide, described by his cousin as his having taken “manna”; it is now generally believed that Hong Xiuguan suffered from psychotic delusions which, in the context of tens of thousands of followers who would otherwise have been reconciled to a life of hunger and abject poverty, would have seemed an attractive option.

In 1904 a sect of the Heaven and Earth Society that had existed for some time was the source used by Sun Yat-Sen to leverage financial support for his quest for revolution and the founding of an eventual republic based upon his “Three Principles of the People” – nationalism, democracy and welfare that would allow the distribution of land equally among the people. To achieve this he formed the Tongmenghui. By 1908, a total of six failed uprisings had occurred. Sun’s leadership came under threat from a rival faction within Tongmenghui that accused him of trying to cause a revolution for his own profit. Sun and his loyal Tongmenghui members relocated to Penang to in an attempt to minimise anti-Sun factions.

Eventually in 1911, with Sun still in exile, what was known as the Wuchang Uprising proved successful and became the catalyst for the Xinhai Revolution that culminated with the abdication of the Last Emperor Puyi in 1912 and the transfer of power to a provisional coalition government. So ended over 2000 years of Imperial rule in China, but no matter how autocratic and fundamentally wrong that rule was, what at least it did provide was a rigid framework; the sweeping away of that framework based on whimsical ideology alone was to lead to decades of political division that at times could be called warlordism. Similar modern-day parallels may be seen in the Middle East.

The aforementioned coalition was between Sun Yat-Sen and Yuan Shikai, once an ally of the late Empress Dowager Cixi but achieved through varying degrees of scheming on his part and fired by his personal belief in the need for a constitutional monarchy based on Japan’s Meiji and Bismarck’s vision for Germany. In Yuan Shikai’s mind he saw himself as constitutional Emperor of a new China. With Sun Yat-Sen in exile at the time of the uprising, Yuan Shikai had the advantage; he was also a scheming manipulator.

Even though the revolutionaries had previously agreed and fought on the premise of Sun Yat-Sen becoming the provisional President of the Republic of China, they were militarily in a weak position. Through Yuan, they were forced to negotiate with the Qing. Yuan’s underhandedness resulted in the abdication of the child Emperor Puyi in return for him, Yuan, being granted the Presidency. Sun had no choice but to agree, but insisted the capital be in Nanjing, not Beijing. Yuan masterminded what seemed as a coup d’etat in Beijing and Tianjing, Sun had to compromise yet again and Yuan Shikai was finally elected Provisional President of the Republic of China with Beijing as its capital in February 1912.

The formation of the first republic was far from being a unifying event. Although the power was technically situated in the north, the reality of China became a fracturing of the south caused by semi autonomous factions that each had a centralised seat of power in a southern city.

In Canton, the Kuomintang was formed out of the Revolutionary Alliance by Sun Yat-Sen and Song Jiaoren; the name Kuomintang meaning the Chinese National People’s Party. Although Sung was the provisional president, his lack of military power forced him to cede the first presidency to Yuan Shikai. Yuan’s intent to reorganise China into provincial governments caused a tension between him and the Kuomintang that just grew progressively until in 1913 Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan, calling for a Second Revolution against Yuan Shikai. By 1914 China’s parliament was dissolved and a new constitutional compact was created that made Yuan Shikai effectively Emperor and, at the end of 1915, he was proclaimed Emperor of the Great Chinese Empire.

Unfortunately, for Yuan Shikai, he came under such opposition that he had to delay his accession and even though he ordered with the former Imperial potters a 40,000-piece porcelain set costing 1.4 million yuan, a large jade seal, and two imperial robes costing 400,000 yuan each, he never got to become the emperor. His new empire and the Yuan Dynasty was dissolved after only 83 days and he died 6 weeks later on June 5th, 1916. 

China was left without any central government, numerous warlords seized local power and the next two decades were to be an ever-increasing convolution of warlordism.  

Sun Yat-sen used the Triad Tiandihui [Heaven and Earth Society] to leverage his overseas travels in order to gain further financial support for his revolutions. Although many of the late 19th/early 20th century “revolutionaries” came from similar backgrounds of reasonably prosperous middle class Chinese families, this first noticeable seeking of financial support from the Triad hongmen was a precedent that would be prevalent over the next two decades or so. It should also be viewed in the context that it was during the late 19th century that the same Hongmen formed branches within Chinese communities in America, Canada and Australia; seeking overseas funding for both revolutionary and localised governance in China had a ready-made network and was a well-used one. So the man who is generally recognised as the father of the nation, Sun Yat-sen, would have been an impotent figure had it not been for Triad funding.

The first twenty years of the 20th century were not kind to the city of Canton. It saw a continuous cycle of power struggles, each exacting excruciating taxes in various guises mainly on the poor working classes in order to fund governance, modernisation of the city and even conflicts. Merchant investors, many having “returned” from the West found this haphazard chaos fertile ground to create wealth through opportunistic redevelopment of the city; rampant capitalism with hardly any overseeing or central control.

These early republican years in Canton saw a strange melange of activities, none of which were either integrated or coordinated, some being funded by private investment, some funded directly by Triads and some funded directly from the new Soviet Union  where Lenin himself took great interest in “potential” in China for furthering communist ideals as well as personal interest in individuals such as Sun Yat-sen and his protégé Chang Kai-shek. Disparate though the sources of funding were, they collectively created what seemed like an unstoppable momentum of redevelopment that in turn created a new momentum of prosperity that shone benevolently on the already prosperous middle class and Triad hierarchy and rarely shone on the levels below.

Strange as the bedfellows were, the theoretical conflict of interests between communist ideals and capitalist goals often share a common denominator that is rarely admitted by proponents of either camp; greed. Greed almost inevitably will create wealth; wealth almost inevitably will manifest itself in the decorative arts simply because they are a fine vehicle for manifesting wealth.

The Sun-Joffe Manifesto of 1923 was an agreement between the Republic of China Kuomintang and the Soviet Union. On the insistence of Sun Yat-sen, it asserted that while the Soviet system was not suitable for China, it announced cooperation between the Soviets and the Kuomintang to unify China. It was a very thin tightrope for all to consider maintaing balance on.

Despite the damage caused in Canton by all the  political unrest and social upheaval and, not withstanding the spiralling cost of living for ordinary residents, the city centre and the Pearl River Bund witnessed a new commercial district that was carved out of streets that had been literally bulldozed to make way for them. The city also saw a vast population expansion of over 1 million from rural areas.

Some 80% of the money being invested in Canton came from returning émigrés from Japan and America. Foreign banks were loathe to loan money to indigenous entrepreneurs and Chinese owned banks resisted local investment. What would appear to many outsiders as being happenstance, Canton did see a rapid rise in prosperity through industry and development, even though it was confined to a “privileged” minority. What did happen, though, was the phenomenon particular to Canton, namely the politicisation of the workers through organised guilds and unions that often escalated into full scale strikes; a phenomenon not shared by the equally burgeoning city of Shanghai where circumstances were totally different to the point were they could even have been separate countries.

The Shanghai International Settlement was the result of the Treaty of Nanking following the so-called First Opium War where the British established a settlement on the banks of the Whangpoo River ‘for the furtherance of their commercial interests”. The French and Americans followed quickly thereafter, each creating their own self-contained area; the three creating the Shanghai Municipal Council as a joint governing body. In 1862 the French concession dropped out of this arrangement and in 1863 the Shanghai International Settlement was created between the British and the Americans. Unlike Hong Kong or WeiHeiWei, Shanghai was not British sovereign territory but the Qing government had ceded sovereignty to the British after the Taiping Rebellion in 1853. The Chinese retained control of the original walled city area. While this somewhat complex situation worked reasonably effectively, it did occasionally display bizarre consequences; in order for a bus or tram driver to complete a cross-city journey, he would require a driver’s license for three countries!

A Shanghai tram in the British section of the city in 1920 at the junction of the Sincere department store on Nanking Road

Up until the end of the settlement in 1941after the Japanese stormed in after the shelling of Pearl Harbour, other foreign governments joined the settlement and the treaty relations. In 1843 Chiang Kai-shek signed a new treaty that effectively brought an end to the extra-territorial privileges of British and American subjects in Shanghai.

It is probably because of its unique governance and core population that Shanghai developed more as a parallel of Hong Kong than of Canton. What all three cities did have in common was the presence of Triads, Western-style department stores and a substantial affluent middle class and it was this potentially potent cocktail that was the engine that generated unprecedented wealth that at times crossed the borders of decency and entered the realms of decadence. Such wealth is almost always new wealth and the nouveau riche will normally create a style of its own. This certainly happened in Shanghai, which was often, in its short lifetime as an international city, compared to the decadence of Paris, Berlin and Buenos Aires. It happened to an extent in Hong Kong, although within the confines of British colonial stiff upper lip-ness and it existed in Canton, although confined to the upper echelons of Chinese society and were adept not only at spending money but also fleeing at a moment’s notice to Yokohama or Tokyo if the heat of unrest over boiled. 

All new-moneyed societies require the instant gratification of frivolous retail therapy and any city that thrives upon the existence of Triad activities will generate a middle ground co-existence that sits somewhere between the Wild West and sophistication. In Shanghai there was always a feeling that tomorrow it all might end, in Hong Kong it was more permanent but they knew the date the lease ran out and in Canton the reality was that tomorrow might not even come. The “privileged” in all three cities, no matter what their time constraints were, had to have the trappings of wealth and, apart from their homes, if they could be portable, so much the better.

Jewellers, silversmiths and department stores were the ubiquitous purveyors of these trappings. In the space of just 25 years, China had moved at lightning speed to distance itself from the confines of Imperialism. The merchandise that was created as a result of that transition was light years away from the merchandise created at the end of the 19th century. Quality was still present, albeit in different measure, but a brashness crept in that in many ways reflected the new order. This confirms that Chinese Export Silver never fails to mirror current history at the time of manufacture.

The cocktail shaker is often used to symbolise the decadence of the 1920’s and 30’s and while this Wang Hing shaker [left] does just that, it still retains the traditionalism of Chinese allegory as well as superb workmanship. It could be viewed as the ultimate fusion pice in what must have been a highly confusing time and place. Yet, being a quality purveyor of luxury goods, Wang Hing & Co still manages to make the full transition to modernism with this 1930’s cocktail shaker [below], totally embracing the Art Deco but refusing to jettison the quality. 

There’s almost a Georg Jensen quality to both the design and finish to this piece; certainly international and sophisticated and not what one would expect from an established Chinese luxury goods house of 80 years. This is without doubt a commissioned piece – one made by a very discerning customer.

Stylish people are always at the forefront of high society. They are the role models that in so many ways act as the pied pipers for followers of fashion and this is an age-old conundrum; followers of fashion do exactly that – follow. To be the pied piper requires style and charisma in order to create that enigmatic magnetism.

If one looks at the contemporary leaders and, more importantly, generators of style and fashion in the West of the time one will discover the underworld; in America it was the world of gangsters and the speakeasy and in Europe it was the night world of cabaret. In China and Hong Kong there was not only a frighteningly rapid move from the frozen world of tradition and Confucian values but the progenitors  of that move were all charismatic figures with a sense of style. The previously singular figure of the Empress Dowager Cixi who was the dominatrix of style in all senses of the word gave way to 20th century figures who all dominated in their own inimitable way.

Madame Chiang, the political mover and shaker wife of Chiang Kai-shek was the creator of a new Chinese style that was avidly copied by everyone who aspired to be anyone in Shanghai and Hong Kong society, copied even by Western women and Hollywood and almost single-handedly responsible for the cheongsam [qipao] becoming part of any self respecting Western couturier’s collection. As a couple, China had, for the first time, the ultimate stylish couple who graced the front covers of Western magazines, their style often making their politics an irrelevancy; they were irresistible as far as the West was concerned.

Very much an integral part of the complex engine that fuelled style in both Shanghai and Hong Kong was the proliferation of nightclubs, most of which were owned and operated by Triad leaders. The ubiquitous cabaret of the 1930’s created their own style icons, many of whom made the transition to the silver screen through the burgeoning film studios in Shanghai.

Anna May Wong [above right] is probably one of the most famous such actresses and she had remarkable stylistic similarities to Madame Chiang [above left]. Her movie with Marlene Dietrich, Shanghai Express, was the first major Chinese-themed Western movie that also featured the Triads within the plot, having the effect of making notoriety chic. Anna May Wong and Madame Chiang became the epitome of a phenomenon known as the “modern woman” [modeng funu], with cheongsams becoming shorter and the side slit rising daringly higher – the Chinese equivalent of the gangster’s moll look. As for Madame Chiang, she was described by one American journalist as being “small, dark, fiery and photogenic” and “reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara” – Madame Chiang actually had a slight Southern twang when speaking English, having spent some of her school years in Georgia – she sounded uncannily like Vivien Leigh.

MADAME CHIANG’S ADDRESS TO US CONGRESS 1943: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61bV9-zeCrA

Shanghai and Hong Kong developed in tandem a highly sophisticated and very particular advertising genre that focussed on using an idealised image of “the modern Chinese woman”, often in the most incongruous contexts. While they may not pertain exactly to the product they are advertising, they do convey the vibrance of this new age in both cities and the high-speed momentum of the emancipation of Chinese women. The Aspirin advertisement is of particular interest when taken in the context of Western medicine within a traditional Chinese remedies mindset.!

Often referred to as the Chinese sphinx, Du Yuesheng was Shanghai’s charismatic king of the underworld, better known to all by his “stage” name Big Ear Du. Du headed the powerful and infamous Green Gang [Qing Bang]. As with Chicago, New York and Berlin, the underworld was largely responsible for generating the prosperity of a city; the Green Gang and Du became the powerful facilitator of almost every successful venture in Shanghai. Due earned the name “zongshi” [grand master].

The writers W.H. Auden and Christopher Underwood were in awe of Du, ferreting often to his mesmeric “rat eyes” and his “terrifying feet” in their silk socks and pointed European boots beneath his eponymous black silk gown and silk top hat. He lived in vast lavish mansions that were always equipped with trapdoors and tunnels for an easy get away and never trusted his tailors for fear of them seeing into his expensively fitted gowns a knife.

Du was President of the Tung Wai Bank and Chung Wai Bank in Shanghai, a director of the Commercial Bank of China and a director of several corporate companies. Although his main source of income was opium, he was rather bizarrely created by Chiang Kai-shek President of the National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau; meanwhile he ran the entire opium trade openly in the French concession area in complicity with the head of police and also served as a Council member.

Du and the Green Gang had a complex relationship with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang; Du Yuesheng was co-opted into the regime’s power structure. Sharing with the Kuomintang the profits from of trafficking opium, the Green Gang brought significant financial support to Chiang Kai-shek, who had established many links with leaders of the criminal underworld.  Chiang saw that the only way to effectively connect with the leadership of the Shanghai bourgeoisie was to have Du officially part of the political machine and equally Du saw that he would benefit from the National Party’s style of state corporatism. Du eventually fled to Hong Kong in 1949 when the Kuomintang exiled to Taiwan; remaining there until he died in 1951. His favourite expression all his life was “you have my word”; not many people argued.

In Hong Kong, the Triads were far more complex, having a conglomerate network of nine major organisations, each often being in rivalry to the others. The end result, though, was the same as in Shanghai – collectively they were the powerful “under the hood” engine without which not much of any consequence could effectively happen. Some of these, such as the 14K Triad, were started by ex-Kuomintang high ranking officials. Unlike the Green Gang, Hong Kong Triads had an international deck of cards that incorporated the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK.

Hong Kong Triads were visually far more low profile than the Green Gang; images of leaders are extremely rare even though their activities are well documented. The Triad Sun Yee On, for example, worked in conjunction with the Wo Hop To Triad but was a rival of 14K and Wo Shing Wo. Hong Kong Triads tended to be on a single ethnicity; Sun Yee on, for example, was Han Chinese – this was a typically Hong Kong situation. In Shanghai, and later across many Chinese cities, the Green Gang dominated the labour unions, while in Hong Kong it was a constant battle for the British administration to curb Triad infiltration of labour unions

Low profile the Triads may have been visually, but as with Shanghai, the extent and speed the luxury industries developed simply would not have happened without their full support and co-operation. Not only had the Chiangs understood this, but many of the heavy-weight investors and industrialists that were operating in both cities were inextricably part of this complicated web. Certainly the Hardoons and the Sassoons, both substantial landowners and developers in both Shanghai and Hong Kong could not have operated without collusion with the Green Gang and their Hong Kong counterparts; between the two families, most of the prime sites were acquired and developed, with even the site of the Kwok family’s Wing On department store in Shanghai held on a 30 year lease from Silas Hardoon at 50,000 taels of silver annually.

In the history of gangsters there has always been an unwritten glamour factor associated with it, a fascination that still grips us today through the medium of film. Glamour was also much written about of the Soong family, of whom Madame Chiang [May-ling] was one of 5 siblings. May-ling’s sister, Ching-lin married Sun Yat-sen, the father of Modern China. Her elder sister Ai-ling was married to H.H. Kung, finance minister of China, banker, economic adviser to Chiang-Kai-shek, was once the richest man in China and was 75th generation direct descendant of Confucius and a devout Christian.

Soong Ching-lin and Sun Yat-sen [left]; Soong Ai-ling and H.H.Kung [right]

T.V. Soong [Tse-ven] was the elder brother and held posts such as Governor of the Central Bank of China, Minister of Finance, was charged with negotiations with Stalin and was Chiang Kai-shek’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a devout Methodist. Soong Zi-an was the younger brother and shunned direct involvement in politics but served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Guangzhou.

T.V.Soong and his wife Zhang Leyi

The Soong siblings can be likened to the Mitford sisters or the Kennedy children and like all society constructs, style icons are sought and when found become part of the hidden engine that motors the momentum of style evolution. Before the formation of the republic, the upper echelons of Chinese society aspired to replicate the Imperial court. The ending of the Qing Dynasty caused a style vacuum that, in the case of China, was filled remarkably quickly. One could even argue that Shanghai created far more style than Hong Kong, perhaps because Hong Kongers were a more fragmented society and one that was infused with the rigid framework of the British colonialist mindset; a condition that as yet had not become moribund.

This 4-piece tea and coffee set by the Shanghai retail silversmith Luen Hing [above] is a superb example of the ingenuity of Chinese silversmiths to create a unique fusion of traditional Chinese motifs and the Art Deco style. It is so redolent of Shanghai and the heady lifestyle that reigned during the first 35 years of the 20th century. The same can be said of this Tuck Chang tea set [also a Shanghai retail silversmith] that is slightly more staid, but nevertheless using the same fusion of Chinese and the Art deco style.

Early 20th century Shanghai and Hong Kong: two very different cities with two very different rules of law – both intent on building a vibrant, affluent modern world, expressing themselves in different ways, both with a strong Triad undercurrent – the real underground engine room that fuelled the extraordinary expressions of creativity in all its forms.

 References:

The Art of War: Ron Gluckman, AsiaWeek, March 2000

The Soong Sisters: Emily Hahn, 1943

The First Lady of China: Harry Thomas, IBM Corp, 1943

Shanghai, The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City: Stella Dong, 2000

The Last Empress – Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China: Hannah Pakula, 2009

Old Shanghai – Gangsters in Paradise: Lynn Pan, 1984

Nation, Governance and Modernity in China: Michael Tsin, Stanford University Press, 1999

The Soong Dynasty: Sterling Seagrave, 1986

China in the 1920’s – Nationalism & Revolution: Gilbert F Chan & Etzold H Tomas, 1976

The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party: Kuo-t’ao Chang, University of Kansas

The Streets of Shanghai: PB Works

East Asian History – The Origin of the Green Gang and its Rise in Shanghai 1850-1920: Brian G Martin,Australian National University, Canberra

Triads: Peter Yam Tat-wing

The Triad Myth: Tony Lee, CIA/Toronto Police

Chinese Triad Society: T Wing Lo & Sharon Ingrid Kwok

Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China: Kwang-Ching Liu & Richard Lon-Chun Shek

Secret Societies in China: Alexander Wylie, 1897

The Origins of the Tiandihui – The Chinese Triads in Legends and History: Dian Murray, 1994

The Green Gang and the Guomindang State – Du Yuesheng and the Politics of Shanghai: Brian G Martin

Acknowledgments:

Tales of Old Shanghai; The World of Chinese – China Dispatch; Grand Lodge of British Columbia & Yukon; People’s Republic of China; JSTOR; Grand Central Inc, Montreal; S & J Stodel, London; Time Magazine; Paramount Pictures

Danny Cheng for his translation skills

Unless specified, all images are from the image archive of Adrien von Ferscht or his associated publications and/or academic research papers

© 2014, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

The post THE INFLUENCE OF THE TRIADS ON THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN CHINA 三合會對中國和香港的裝飾藝術之影響 appeared first on chinese export silver.

Auction houses are ideal platforms for judging buying trends which by default would also include prevailing values. In a recent sale at Dreweatts in the UK, 39 Chinese Export Silver delivered some surprises; it goes without saying that the majority of buyers were from China.

The trend at this sale and recently at other auction houses is that Chinese buyers are appearing to become more discerning. Discernment, though, is in itself highly subjective and can often be at odds with expert opinion; when an antique object enters the commercial world of the auction houses it can often create a dichotomy of opinion between a buyer being ruled by the heart and the experts who are governed by established, conventional and academic perceptions.

Chinese Export Silver is one of the largest silver categories; it is also the least understood, but it is not in the remit of any auction house to act in judgement – it is a facilitator acting on behalf of its consignees. So one is left with the conundrum should one educate the buying public or should they be left alone to judge acquisitions for themselves – and the price they are prepared to pay. If it is the latter, then there’s a risk that pieces that are worthy of being judged as exceptional fall into a new and unfortunate category of silver oblivion! However, in a situation where the silver being sold is Chinese in origin, that the buyer is Chinese yet the silver has spent the past 125 or so years in the West, there is bound to be what might seem at first glance a conflict. The reality is more likely to be that despite massive strides forwards in the past decade, Chinese people in general still retain a default traditional mindset. A good example is probably the fact that more Chinese people will instinctively turn to traditional Chinese remedies rather than instinctively buy generic off-the-shelf Western medicines. In the same way, silver items that display overtly traditional Chinese decorative motifs still naturally draw Chinese interest, while what Western “experts” have traditionally upheld as masterpieces in the shape of neo-classical Chinese Export Silver pieces currently might not intuitively be attractive. China is a nation in fast-track transitional mode; aesthetic appreciation will undoubtedly change as the nation finds its final place in the world order.

The atmosphere of the auction room always changes at a silver sale several gears upwards when bidding for lots in the Chinese Export Silver section is reached and this was certainly so at Dreweatts’ sale on July 9th at Donnington Priory in England. Phone lines glow red hot and internet bidding is hard keep pace with.

The surprise leader of the pack was this late 19th century Straits Chinese silver octagonal bowl and cover, intricately decorated with an engraved foliate motif and alternating side panels of a traditional shrew amidst fruiting vines, a bird amidst bamboo, a dragon amidst floating clouds and a flowering shrub – all set between finely executed meander borders. The bowl romped home at £6500 [$11,130].

A handsome circa 1880 Chinese Export Silver hexalobed 15inch [38cm] diameter salver [above] bearing the mark of the Canton-based retail silversmith KC achieved £3500 [$6000]. Traditionally decorated with a chrysanthemum wreath motif centrally placed on the tray bordered by a raised prunus and bamboo motif interspersed with birds and surrounded by a narrow bamboo rim, the tray sits upon bamboo leaf bracket feet.

An ornate late 19th century swing-arm oval basket by Wang Hing & Company [below], decorated in a neo-baroque style with four chrysanthemum-emblazoned rocaille reserves against a fine open trellis background, sitting upon a flared reticulated base of bamboo foliage sold for $1300.

Certainly, over the past 5 years it has been interesting to see how the preferences of Chinese collectors has changed. There’s a noticeable degree of discernment now that was lacking five years ago, but it is equally intriguing to see patterns of interest developing that show a distinct difference to those of Western collectors.

This particular sale confirmed a steadily growing interest among collectors in China for enamel and silver gilt wares that were very much a product of the second half of the 20th century, mainly from workshops operating in Beijing. Beijing has always been traditionally the spiritual home of cloisonné, but the former Imperial enamel and cloisonné workshops had almost all been closed by the beginning of the 20th century after the death of the Empress Dowager Cixi and before the eventual fall of the Qing Dynasty. A significant number of these workshops re-grouped and were encouraged by the demand for their work to open as independent manufactories and they managed to thrive until the fall of the Republic. In the new communist government regime, all private enterprise was either closed down or was consolidated into state-run factories – somewhat curiously, the new regime saw fit retain cloisonné and enamel production, even though it had no relevance whatsoever to the new order of communist ideals.

An 11cm tall silver-gilt and enamel dome lidded filigree canister [above] decorated with applied hardstones, enamelled flower heads and leaves and embellished with rue and other scroll work was sold for $1725. This 20th century work has evolved into a genre all of its own; like all genres, there is well-produced work and there is work that simply seeks to masquerade and take a ride a popularist band wagon. This particular canister, although 20th century, is an example of good workmanship.

As a genre, it finds its roots in late 18th century Chinese Export Silver filigree work that was mainly created by Canton silver workshops and became a speciality of a handful of quality retail silversmiths such as Cutshing and Pao Ying, both of whom were known to be purveyors of such items to the Imperial Court in Russia; the largest known collection of this work can be found in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

This impressive pair of late 18th century Chinese Export Silver gilt filigree pedestal lidded vases, although unmarked are typically in the style of Pao Ying, the domed lids and ornately worked ovoid bodies decorated with filigree flowers, foliage and fruits, all on a fine woven ground are exactly what the later 20th century wares strive to mimic. The stems of the vases are with ball knopfs on octagonal bases with fretwork edges and feet. Essentially, although 200 years separate the original wares from the contemporary 20th century items, the skills intrinsically remain the same. This 15.5cm tall pair of vases sold at Dreweatts recently for £17,000 [$29,000].

A rather dramatic small Chinese silver gilt and enamel bowl with a jadeite rim and brown and blue enamelled body and standing upon four dragon feet with five toes sold for $1750. Again, this is typical work of the post-republic Beijing enamel workshops.

The exact location of the workshops of the Beijing maker Bao Xin are not documented, but it is highly likely they were situated within the Forbidden City complex since this maker created silver and enamel tribute pieces commissioned by the Imperial Court. They, too, were highly intricate filigree bespoke items and ceremonial sceptres were commonly presented. The head of one such a sceptre [below] clearly demonstrates the intricacy and high level of workmanship, but yet again the same basic skills are those that emerged in the “new genre” items of the 20th century. Such sceptres are rare, but would be generally expected to achieve $47,000 at auction, as the one pictured below recently did.

It is envisaged that the current interest in Chinese Export Silver will continue to grow and with that growth, an ever-increasing level of discernment. Given Chinese Export Silver is one of the largest categories of silver produced during its 155 year manufacturing period, there’s certainly a significant amount of important pieces still available to come to auction. As the understanding of Chinese Export Silver grows, in particular the important place it has within Chinese culture from the late 17th century through to the end of the Republic era, a two-tier category of this silver will probably emerge; the important pieces taking the lead roles and being captured by the spotlights and the more “bread and butter” items forming the majority core – it should be stressed, however, that the latter are all high quality items with the former being the star show stealers. Hopefully a black hole of silver oblivion may be avoided.

References:

 “The Art of Filigree” by Adrien von Ferscht [http://chinese-export-silver.com]

 “Silver Wonders from the East: Filigree of the Tsars”, Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam

Acknowledgments:

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, UK

All images are either courtesy of Dreweatts or from the Image Library database of Adrien von Ferscht

© 2014, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

The post SOUTH EAST ASIAN SILVER STARS appeared first on chinese export silver.

A nation with a 1400 year history of silver making and an economy that was obsessed with being silver-based until well into the 20th century, it is strange to learn that it could exist without any assay system.

In the 155-year Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period, the vast majority of silver items that were made did carry a silver mark, 100 years of which many of the marks indicated the purity content by the addition of a number, more often than not 90 or simply the word ‘sterling’. With no regulation or even self-regulation of silver marks, one could be left wondering how credible the marks we are presented with actually are.

Silver poured into China over several centuries. Generally it would have come from one of four sources; mines in Spanish Central and South America, Japan or China itself as well as from silver trade dollars used to trade with China at the insistence of the Imperial court by various Western trading nations that were allowed to trade.

An early King Philip III of the Spains 8 reales cob coin; 27.7gm; 0.917 silver Potosi Mint [Bolivia] Philip III: The House of Hapsburg Philip was styled “Philip the Third, by the grace of God, King of Castile, Leon, Aragon and the Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, the Majorcas, Seville, Cordoba, Corsica, Murcia, Guinea, Algarve, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, also of the Eastern and Western Indies, and the Islands and Terra Firma of the Ocean Sea, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy and Milan, Count of Habsburg, Barcelona, and Biscay, and Lord of Molina, etc

The first silver dollar came into being in 1598 as a result of monetary reform in Spain in the shape of the 8 Reales coin [peso de ocho or ‘pieces of eight’], the term peso becoming the basis of currencies in most of the former Spanish colonies. One of the main purposes of this coin was to correlate with the German Thaler, a term derived from the word thal or ‘valley’; Joachimsthal being the valley in the Czech Republic [the then Holy Roman Empire] where silver ore was mined. The word thal  passed into Scandinavian countries as daler and into English as dollar.

Holy Roman Empire 1549 Thaler silver coin
showing the head of Emperor Ferdinand I, the House of Hapsburg and son of the Spanish King Philip I of Castile
Ferdinand’s full titulature, rarely used, went as follows: Ferdinand, by the grace of God elected Holy Roman Emperor, forever August, King in Germany, of Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Rama, Serbia, Galicia, Lodomeria, Rumania and Bulgaria, etc. Prince-Infante in Spain, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Luxembourg, the Upper and Lower Silesia, Württemberg and Teck, Prince of Swabia, Princely Count of Habsburg, Tyrol, Ferrette, Kyburg, Gorizia, Landgrave of Alsace, Margrave of the Holy Roman Empire, Enns, Burgau, the Upper and Lower Lusatia, Lord of the Wendish March, Pordenone and Salins, etc.

The dynamic created by China’s long-term acquisition of silver from Central and South America made for a complex series of phenomena that at times presented serious consequences to different areas of Europe and in fact to world trade as we know it today.

In the 16th century, Spain was quick to understand the vast economic potential of Peru where in the highlands [alti plano] of Upper Peru Potosi sat upon the largest concentration of silver deposits in what was then considered to be the Western World. While some of the deposits were to be found on the surface, the vast majority of deposits were within the mountains. After an initial high-yield period of 15 years, production soon fell when the realisation hit that this was going to be a long-term project that would depend on a high level and consistency of manpower. Deep mining also required new technology to make it feasible. As a result, Toledo had to impose new laws on its colony that were tantamount to a form of “national service” that compelled males to “serve” as miners every six years in strict rotation. The indigenous Indian population was ‘organised’ to optimise the the production of corn, wheat and coca leaves as well as silver. The absolute control of the Spanish colonial rule demanded a substantial ‘tribute’ payment from the Indians that went directly to the Spanish Crown. Hydraulic technology was introduced to mining and an on-site mint was established at Potosi to create silver coinage and ingot bars.

The reality of the regime imposed upon the Indians was completely uncaring and brutal. The greed-driven Spanish stance could be likened to a full-scale rape and plunder of the food and mineral capabilities the country presented.

Firstly, Potosi must be taken in the context of it being situated some 4100 metres above sea level – it was to become the highest city in the world. Potosi was also unequivocally expropriated by the Spanish Crown and the population forced to work it. In an account written by José de Acosta, a Jesuit, in 1569 he wrote “ Indians labour in these mines in continual darkness and obscurity, without knowledge of day or night. And forasmuch as those places are never visited with the sun, there is not only a continual darkness, but also an extreme cold, with so foul an air contrary to the disposition of man, that such as newly enter are as they are at sea.” He then deliberates on the process of separating the silver from the lethal quicksilver [mercury]: “When the melting is finished, they unstop the pots and draw forth the metal, sometimes staying until it be very cold, for if there remained any fume or vapour, which should encounter them that unstopped the pots, they were in danger of death, or to be benumbed of least to loose their teeth, their limbs, or fat.”

If this wasn’t perilous enough, the ore was first carried out of the interior of the mine by carrying loads in the region of 11 kilograms physically on human backs up a series of vertical ladders in the pitch dark of the shafts. José de Acosta concludes with an appeal to the Spanish Emperor “Your Majesty should know: where do the mine owners get the means to dress up all in silk and gold and silver, other than from the labor of the poor Indians and from what they steal from Your Majesty? Therefore, it would be good that these mine owners be inspected every six months and audited…”

A 16th century woodcut of Potosi Hill [Cerro de Potosi], aka Rich Hill [Cerro Rico]

In the 16th century, Potosi was nothing more than a backwater town. By the mid-17th century the population of Potosi was in the region of 160,000, equal to the population of Paris and London at the time and probably double that of Madrid. Potosi, though, grew as a city of many colours and creeds.

1639 Tribunal of the Inquisition [Auto de la Fé] held in Lima

The merging of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580 also led to thousands of Jewish Marranos from Portugal arriving in Peru, where the financial opportunities were potentially great and it was considered to be safe.  Certain customs still maintained by old families in the region such as the lighting of candles on Friday nights and sitting on the ground in mourning when a close relative dies, suggest Jewish ancestry. Having endeavoured to escape the Inquisition at the time of the unification of the two Iberian crowns, Marrano Jews soon found themselves in exactly the same situation with the establishment of an Inquisition in Lima. In 1570 a letter was sent to the General Inquisitor referring specifically to Peru and Chile stating “with respect to the few Spaniards in these parts, there are two times as many converts as in Spain”.

Spain introduced the laws of the Inquisition to Peru which at the time comprised all its colonies in South America in 1569.

Grand Inquisitors Francisco Verdugo and Andrés Juan Gayton both reported at the time that “The village of Potosi is so full of Portuguese…..and generally speaking they are all from the Hebrew nation, and our experience shows that those who have been imprisoned by the Inquisition all Judaize and that they now live very cautiously and are no longer as easily identifiable as before”.

Henry Charles Lea, American historian,  wrote in 1908 in his 4 volume body of work ‘The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies’ about Portuguese ‘New Christians’: “They became masters of the commerce of the kingdom; from brocade to sack-cloth, from diamonds to cumin seed, everything passed through their hands; the Castilian who had not a Portuguese partner could look for no success in trade.”

1571 is the year world trade was effectively born. It was also the year Manila, in the Philippines, came into being; the Spanish having created the last link in a maritime network between the Americas and Asia, previously dominated by their arch rivals the Portuguese. As with world trade, silver was the main cargo and China was inevitably the final destination.

The Dutch and English East India Companies have, for centuries, had us believe that it was Europe that fired the engine of Asia. The reality was exactly the reverse. Had China’s unquenchable thirst not existed, neither would these two companies. To compound matters, China produced luxury items the West couldn’t get enough of, namely porcelain, silks, tea, paintings, lacquerware, metalwork and ivory. Since its inception, world trade has always had potentially unfortunate side effects, trade imbalance being one of them.

Towards the late 16th century and into the early 17th century, the exchange rate for gold against silver in Spain was between 1:12 and 1:14. In China the rate was between 1:5 and 1:7. This clearly demonstrates that silver had an intrinsic value double that of Europe within China. Such a divergent value of a single commodity creates exceptional prospects for what is known as “profitable arbitrage trade”; trade that profits by exploitation of price or value differences of identical or similar financial instruments on different markets or in different forms. In some ways, China was utilising a financial strategy that is not far from being what we recognise today as a “hedge fund”!

Mexico tried in vain to limit the amount of silver being shipped to China trying to keep it in the region of 150 tons annually. They more or less achieved this, however it is generally estimated that in excess of 300 tons annually was managed to be smuggled out and onwards to China. Manila was shipping 50 tons annually. To put this into some perspective, fifty tons of silver is approximately the average annual exports to Asia by Portugal, the Dutch and the English East India Companies combined in the 17th century.

One cannot help wondering how different the picture might have been had the once Ming maritime fleet not come to an abrupt halt when it did. The Dutch and the English East India Companies might not have succeeded!

The Spanish monarchy was to reap the most benefits from New World silver mining by imposing an initial 20% tax on the gross value extracted at source. They then levied further taxation on precious metals entering Seville en route for China of 27%. Mining profits provided the fiscal foundation for the Spanish Empire. Without China’s incessant need for ever-more silver, Spain would not have been able to finance a series of wars [some simultaneously] with the Ottomans, Protestant England and Holland, France, the New World as well as Asia, not to mention against the indigenous population in the Philippines. China, unwittingly, changed the balances of power within Europe simply by its hunger for silver.

The amount of silver pouring into the Ming treasury was in the region of $190 billion in today’s values. The Ming dynasty was responsible for over 30% of the entire world’s GDP.

But New World silver was not the only source of raw silver for China. A succession of Emperors had been adamant that apart from silver, the West could offer nothing to China. Not only did they not import anything, but successive Emperors insisted that in order to trade with China for the luxury items the West sought payment could only be made using what have become known as Trade Dollars. They were also part of the eventual catalyst that gave birth to Chinese Export Silver, with much of this coinage being melted down into sycee [ingots – yuánbǎo 元宝] which in turn created the general accepted assumption that most Chinese Export Silver is .90 fine.

Money handlers, known as shroffs were responsible for determining the purity and weight in taels [liang 两] of the ingots, including appropriate discounts and premiums. Individual silversmiths were responsible for their manufacture and not as one might expect, an official mint. Despite the involvement of the shroffs, we do know that “bad” sycee did get through the checks, sometimes even containing small stones or gravel.

1739 trade dollar from the Mexico mint showing the ‘pillars of Hercules” on the reverse side [left] which is the emblem of Seville and thought to be the inspiration that created the modern ‘$’ symbol. On the obverse side [right] PHILIP[PUS] V D[EI] G[RATIA] HISPAN[IARUM] ET IND[IARUM] REX
“Philip V, by the Grace of God, King of the Spains and the Indies”
Displays the arms of Castile and León with Granada in base and an inescutcheon of Anjou.

Mexican trade dollars were [8 Reales or “pieces of eight”] were issued at 420 grains, a fundamental unit of the Troy system of wight measurement, nominally based on a grain of barley – Troy being the official weight for many European countries and in England from 1527. The fineness was .903 silver.

1776 8 Reales Charles III trade dollar known as the “Carolus” dollar

Immediately after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the trade dollar, known affectionately as the Carolus dollar, became the preferred payment method and often was considered to have a premium value up to 15% above its prevailing silver content value.

The American trade dollar was first issued in 1873 and was minted in large quantities at the Carson City, San Francisco and Philadelphia mints. It was never intended for circulation within America and was to be used in competition with the Mexican trade dollar for trade with China. It was issued as 420 grains, the same as the Mexican dollar but set it apart from the regular standard silver dollar which had 412.5 grains. It is believed that some 36 million trade dollar coins were minted, the American government receiving a 100 cent levy on every coin issued. The fineness of the US trade dollar was .900 [90%], approximately 8 grains more than the the domestic silver dollar and 4 more than the Peso.

Because of an an ever-growing demand for tea and other luxury goods in the United Kingdom and America and an insistence of only silver in payment, this resulted in large continuous trade deficits. A trade imbalance came into being that was highly unfavourable and intolerable for Britain.

It is estimated approximately 270 million British Trade dollars were circulated in total. Mercantilist governments resented this perpetual drain of silver from West to East in payment for Oriental goods that were in high demand in the Occident, while facing low demand in the Orient for Occidental goods. Also, as a result of the Treaty of Nanking after the first “Opium War” and with the extension of British trading interests in the East, especially after the founding of Singapore in 1819 and Hong Kong in 1842, it became necessary to produce a special Dollar so as to remove the reliance of a British Colony upon the various foreign coins then in circulation.

The first British trade dollar was minted in 1895  exclusively for use in the Far East, depicts Britannia standing on shore holding a trident in one hand and balancing a British shield in the other, with a merchant ship under full sail in the background. On the reverse is an arabesque design with the Chinese symbol for longevity in the centre, and the denomination in two languages – Chinese and Jawi Malay. Those marked with ‘C’ were minted in Calcutta and those with ‘B’ at the Bombay mint. The fineness was 0.900 silver, although the original trial coin was minted in 0.925 silver.

A 1906 British silver trade dollar

When designing the coin, it was decided not to have an image of Queen Victoria as it was not considered politic to portray an empress on a coin to be used in a country ruled by an emperor. Well over 267,200,000 British trade dollars are known to have been struck and circulated from the two Indian mints, but several re-strikes are known to have happened although scant records of these exist.

As trade dollars from all sources entered China, merchants would apply their ‘chop mark’ in order to guarantee authenticity and content. It was also a cunning way for merchants to advertise. Payment for invoices issued in China often called for ‘first chop’ coins – coins with only one chop mark were considered to have minimal loss of silver from only one incuse mark. It was common for merchants to insist on ‘first chop Mexican dollars’, these being the most valuable in terms of silver content and purity.

From the mid-17th century, more than 9 billion Troy ounces, or 290 thousand tonnes, of silver was absorbed by China from European countries in exchange for Chinese goods.

A 1904 Kiangnan Province ‘Dragon’ dollar

In the early 20th century, China decided to try to control the array of silver coinage circulating by minting its own version which became known as “dragon” or “kwangtung” dollars. It transpired that the coins were marked with the names of provincial mints which, in tandem with scaremongering rumours that the coins were inferior to their trade dollar counterparts, caused the the project to end in failure.

The warlord Zhou Xicheng’s silver dollar that became known as the AUTO DOLLAR commemorating the opening of his Kweichow Highway. On the following year it is said that the warlord Zhou Xicheng was driving his automobile on the road that he constructed. He then sped up and left his troops at a distance behind him. Shockingly, he was ambushed by rebel enemy troops and, while trying to escape, he ran out of his car and was left dead on the grass on the side of the road.

Towards the end of the Qing dynasty when the warlords were rife, local warlords used their nearest provincial mint to issue their own ‘dragon money’ which simply added confusion to an already chaotic coinage pot. As a result of the warlord connection of these coins, they were often found to be far inferior in quality and content than any previously issued coinage.

The last in the line of Chinese attempts at a silver dollar was the Yuan Shih-kai dollar or “Fatman” dollar, as it was more popularly known. In a survey carried out by the Shanghai Bank, of the 960 million silver dollars known to be in circulation in 1924, 750 million were Fatman dollars. The coin was in fact produced between 1914 and 1921 and had a purity of .890 silver and weighed 26.4gm. In the first year it was struck, some 300,000 dollars were minted every day at the Central Mint in Tianjin. These coins can be identified by a distinctive ’T’ edge mill to the coin sides.

Whether the issue of Yuan Shih-kai dollar coins stabilised the monetary system in China is debatable, but at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Mexican dollar was still considered to be superior or more desirable to the Chinese counterpart. It should also be taken into the context of 280 million ‘dragon’ dollars that were withdrawn and melted when the ‘Fatman’ was introduced. It is also known that although the date span of the Fatman dollar was 1914-1921, a substantial amount of ‘copy’ coins were produced and circulated – some of these coins were so low in silver content that it was possible to attract them with a magnet. Many of these sub-standard coins were made and issued after 1921 and carried spurious year dates. What is certain is that after the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the republic period, the integrity of silver currency circulating in China had begun to be compromised.  When this happens, it is inevitably driven by a combination of greed, a known lack of an assay system and a general lack of checks, balances and written records. With Chinese Export Silver still in production at this time and knowing the approximate timing of this breakdown in the integrity of silver coinage, one might be led to question the accuracy of silver marks on silver items that purported to convey information of the silver purity.

The ‘Fatman’ Silver Dollar

However, it is already a well-established fact that silver marks that appear on Chinese silver from the late 18th century until the early 1940s convey little useful information. Equally well-established is the fact that no regulatory system existed for silver items manufactured in China during this period and there was no legal obligation to mark silver. There is no conformity to Chinese silver marks and some, in particular the neo-classical pieces made in the late 18th century to around 1840, bore marks that were often more whimsical and to the detriment of being useful sources of information. This does not necessarily mean, however, that silver items of the Chinese Export Silver manufacturing era were inferior in either silver purity or workmanship – in most cases they weren’t and in many cases they were superior to Western counterparts.

While extensive forensic research has been carried out on Western silver, relatively little has has been undertaken with a specific focus on Chinese Export Silver. In 1993, however, an investigative analysis project was undertaken by Janice Carlson at Winterthur Museum’s Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory in Delaware, USA that did just this. The fact it had little impact at the time and has sadly languished in an archive until quite recently may probably be due to the fact few people were actually aware of the existence of Chinese Export Silver in the early 1990s.

Janice Carlson employed X-ray Fluorescent Spectrometry [XRF Analysis], an analytical non-destructive technique that uses the interaction of x-rays with a material to determine its elemental composition and is widely used today in museums, archeology and precious metal assay offices.

The analytical exercise was performed on 48 carefully chosen hollow-ware objects that were unquestionably attributable to the Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period. While the XRF investigation were faultlessly carried out, the point of reference with regards to period, age and what was then believed to be the ‘makers’ was the body of work of Crosby Forbes et al, 1975. This is where the science  goes slightly awry since the Crosby Forbes work only acknowledged silver that was present in the USA and in most cases what were taken to be ‘makers’ were in fact retail silversmiths. The three manufacturing periods set out by the Crosby Forbes work were created out of first-hand knowledge of the interaction of the Massachusetts Bay merchants in the China Trade, Crosby Forbes being a descendant of one of the merchant families. The project also adopted Crosby Forbes’ belief that the majority of Chinese Export Silver made between 1840 and 1885 went to the United States. Quite simply, this is incorrect and through research and findings carried out in the past six years, a far truer picture and understanding of this complex silver phenomenon is now known*. None of this, however, greatly affects the findings of Carlson’s analysis.

As a counter reference, XRF analysis was first carried out on two Spanish ‘8 Reales’ Mexican silver coins [no dates were given for the coins] which were found to have an average of:

The silver objects were divided into three manufacturing periods using Crosby Forbes as a guide and then sub-divided into what at the time were believed to have been makers’s marks, but were in fact retail silversmiths’ marks. The fact that Chinese retail silversmiths used outside artisan workshops and as a result had no effective ‘quality’ control over the purity of silver being used should not unduly compromise Carlson’s findings, but at the time of the research, Carlson believed the marks to be those of actual makers, as did Crosby Forbes.

The findings clearly demonstrate a variation of the average silver purity according to the period of manufacture the items were attributed to. That attribution could only have been a subjective one and it is unclear who carried out the identification of objects and when that was done – both of which are relevant given how much the understanding of Chinese Export Silver has changed since the 1980s/1990s.

The analysis was further expanded to include 87 items of  Chinese Export Silver flatware flatware [cutlery]:

These findings are both interesting and not surprising given the collective history of what was effectively raw silver coming into China over almost 500 years. Focussing on the hollow ware, the varying silver purity of each manufacturing period loosely reflects the reality of the source of silver entering China, while the average of 91.63 across the three manufacturing indices brings a logic to another silver marking phenomenon of the late 19th century and very early 20th century.

The Chinese retail silversmith Wang Hing & Company is really the only such retailer that regularly exported to Great Britain – or perhaps it would be more correct to say that a known Glasgow retail silversmith regularly imported silver wares from Wang Hing & Company over a period of approximately 40 years.

Edward & Sons in Glasgow was known to stock items of Wang Hing silver that also carried the Glasgow assay office hallmark. The Wang Hing mark carrying a purity value of .96 [above] is particularly interesting. This value only ever appears on items sent to Edwards. More usual, however, is the .95 value [right]. The overriding norm for a Wang Hing silver mark with no connection to any non-Chinese silversmith is .90

The British assay system was set up in order to test the purity [assay] of precious metals. Once an assay officer had successfully assayed an item [i.e. found the metallurgical content was found to be equal or better than that claimed by the maker and it conforms to the prevailing law], a hallmark could be applied. In the case of items from Wang Hing, in principle they were not the actual maker and at the time Wang Hing was supplying Edward & Sons, it is highly doubtful there was an understanding that the Chinese character mark was the artisan silversmith’s mark. It was known, however, that China and Hong Kong had no formal assay system and it would have been equally doubtful that the London assay office would have asserted to mark such silver.

Glasgow was historically the main port where tea from China was landed and was also the port where much of the opium was landed. Silver wares were always shipped as a ballast cargo; it was never the main cargo a ship would have carried. Scottish merchants were by far in the majority among all the merchant traders involved in the China Trade, which begs the question whether the Glasgow assay office had a more laissez-faire attitude towards silver coming into Glasgow from China specifically for Edward & Sons.  It also begs the question why and how Wang Hing increased the silver purity mark for Edward-bound items.  While these questions remain open-ended, it is planned to conduct a XRF analysis of Edward & Sons/Wang Hing items in the near future.**

In the absence of any conformity of Chinese Export Silver marks, It is interesting to note that the most confusing period of marking relates to silver made between 1785 and 1840 when by far the most prevalent marks were so-called ‘pseudo-hallmarks’.  The vast majority of this silver was created in the neo-classical style and from a silver-making perspective this is often silver comparable in quality to the work of the finest English and European silversmiths of the day. No silver thus marked carried any indicator of silver purity – it is not until after 1840 that purity marks began to appear, such marks never being obligatory and always at the random whim of either the maker or the retail silversmith.

While these marks are mere pastiches of the “real thing” [i.e. a London hallmark], they give a fascinating clue to the complex global reality that was their raison d’être.

Between the years 1810-1820, there was a serious decline in output from the South American silver mines that resulted in a drop of over 50% in the mined silver; the cause was the civil chaos that resulted from the strive for independence in Mexico. This not only reduced the amount of silver available for China to acquire but it had serious implications on established trades other nations had with China, for example the tea and silk trade that Britain generated. Britain also had far less silver available to fulfil its own manufacturing needs as a result. Less silver in Britain launched the manufacturing costs and retail prices of English and Scottish silversmiths on a steep upward curve. Despite the fall in new silver available to it, China had far more silver bullion available due to centuries of stockpiling than Britain or any other country on earth. Chinese silversmiths demanded a fraction of the price of a London or Birmingham silversmith yet their quality of Canton workmanship was on a par with the very best in Britain.

British merchants in Canton were quick to realise this, so did the ever-wily sea captains plying the China Trade routes and the controlling Hong merchants in Canton were operating on exactly the same wavelength. This is the main reason why we are aware of so much Chinese silver made in this period in the neo-classical “Georgian” style. It is this combined dynamic that caused such an outpouring of pseudo-English silver from Canton to Britain and to America’s Massachusetts Bay and not, as had been the general perception of this phenomenon, some whimsical desire to create silver in the a potpourri of classical Western styles.

An early-mid 19th century tea and coffee set in the neo-classical style with the beginnings of Chinese influences

There has also been a long-held school of thought that entrepreneurial sea captains brought redundant Western silver to Canton to be ‘re-cycled’ into newer, more fashionable pieces that were then re-exported back. It is highly doubtful this was the case. Not only were the neo-classical pieces created in Canton generally of a far heavier gauge of silver to any Western counterpart, the sheer logistics of reprocessing existing silver items makes no sense whatsoever. Equally, the belief that silver examples were brought to Canton to copy is hard to substantiate given this would have meant valuable silver items being away from its owners for over a year at a time when they would have been at their height of fashion and social desirability. The lifestyles of the privileged foreign merchants resident in the ‘factories’ at Canton and, in particular, their entertaining, was legendary. An abundance of the finest china, silverwares and cutlery would have been in everyday use at table and it is more likely that these provided the templates for the skilled Canton silversmiths to copy as well as provide ‘inspiration’ for some artistic licence.

Assay systems are an effective method to ensure consistency of silver quality of manufactured items.  British silverwares, for example, have remained at or near the Sterling standard of 92.5% for several centuries. American silver, which was not governed by such a system, although hovering at an average of around 90% purity, was actually known to have varied over quite a wide range. Yet in China, which also had no regulatory system, an average purity of 90.5% was achieved over the entire 155 year manufacturing period of the Chinese Export Silver era. This is hardly surprising given the raw material sources were either ingots from high-quality mined silver or silver trade dollars of known provenance.

Conclusion:

Despite the absence of an assay system and any form of state-imposed regulation, for over 500 years, Chinese silver and silverwares maintained a remarkable consistency of silver purity.

* “CHINESE EXPORT SILVER 1785-1940 – The Definitive Collectors’ Guide” by Adrien von Ferscht, [2015] – Tsinghua University, Beijing; University of Glasgow.

** Planned research to be carried out at the Chinese Silver Research Institute [CSRI] at Tsinghua University, Beijing

REFERENCES:

Cipolla, Carlo M. (ed) The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Fontana. [1974]

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman emperor. The Columbia Encyclopaedia, Sixth Edition. [2001]

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Whaley

Gunter Böhm, Los Judios en Chile durante la Colonia [Santiago. 1948]

Letter written by the Inquisitors Francisco Verdugo and Andrés Juan Gayton, 4 May 1622. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid [Inquisición Libro 1038]

Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, Volumes 1-4, [1909]

Krause, Chester L. and Mishler, Clifford: Standard Catalog of World Coins [1996]

Julian, R. W., The Rise and Fall of the Trade Dollar [2003]

Bertin, E. P., Principles and Practice of X-ray Spectrometric Analysis, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers

Carlson, Janice H., X-ray Fluorescent Analysis of Chinese Export Silver, Winterthur Museum, Delaware, USA [1993]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

The Museum of Money, Moscow, Russia; Daniel Frank Sedgwick, LLC, Florida, USA; The Royal Mint Museum Library, London

THANKS:

Chao Huang, Institute of Science & Technology and Cultural Heritage, University of Science and Technology, Beijing

                        China Center, Center for Cultural Studies on Science and Technology in China, Technische Universität Berlin

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

The post THE ABSENCE OF AN ASSAY SYSTEM  金银检验系统的缺失 HOW CHINA, A SILVER-OBSESSED NATION, MANAGED WITHOUT ONE 为银狂热的中国是如何做到的 appeared first on chinese export silver.

THE CALIFORNIA GOLD-RUSH EFFECT ON CHINESE SILVER AND HONG KONG

加州淘金热对中国银器和香港的影响                                                                                                        by Adrien von Ferscht

The more it is researched, Chinese Export Silver is shown to be by far the most complex and diverse silver category.  It is virtually impossible to pick up an item of this silver without it being far more than what its outward appearance conveys. Picking up a piece of Chinese Export Silver is tantamount to holding a hand grenade that is so packed with a diversity of history, culture and artistic merit that it is ready to explode and reveal its secrets.

While the name it has been saddled with is more a misnomer than anything approaching an appropriate title, it is one that has stuck for the past 50 years or so, for Chinese Export Silver was not necessarily made for what it now says on the can. Despite a period of 60 years at the end of the 18th century up until around 1840 when a significant amount of neo-classical silver was made ostensibly for the “export market”, much of the silver prior to that and afterwards was made for consumption in China either by Western residents or the rising Chinese middle class.

It is only recently the amount of collated research has revealed some of the identities of what had been considered by the West as the ‘makers’ – most were not makers, they were retail silversmiths or merchant traders of which silver was just one of the specialist commodities. But identifying the person behind the silver mark can often take one on an unexpected journey through time and place. One such a silver mark is Chong Woo of Hong Kong.

Silver bearing the Chong Woo mark has always been quite scarce, yet more often than not associated with quality pieces,  but it is a silver mark with no particular definitive style. It is a mark that dates back to the early days of the British colony – 1849 to be exact, and it clearly shows there was someone who understood quality of workmanship and style firmly in control.

As with most Chinese retail silversmith’s marks, the name is totally fictitious. The real person behind the mark was one Chiu Yu Tin, one of the earliest Chinese settlers on the island, arriving there at the tender age of 14 to seek his fortune. He came from a poor family in Nanhai, not far from Canton. Interestingly, a significant number of the Canton retail silversmiths hailed from Foshan in Nanhai district. Chiu Yu Tin may well have had some family connection with silversmithing.

What we do know, however, is that by 1849, Chiu Yu Tin had made sufficient money to be able to open his first luxury goods business and by 1853 he appears in the Hong Kong Directory as a purveyor of “Chinese Fancy Goods”. 1849 is also an auspicious date in American history since it is the year gold was first discovered by James Marshall at Sutter’s Sawmill in what is today Sacramento, not far from San Francisco.

We also know that very soon after opening the Hong Kong operation, beginning in 1851, the San Fransisco Custom House logged entries coming into the USA from Hong Kong from the “Chinaman Chungwoo’ of merchandise comprising teas, silks and other assorted items to the value of $426 being shipped to three separate Chinese merchants in San Francisco. Later shipments were to also include lacquerware, silver wares, furniture, shawls, bed-covers and even women’s shoes.

In 1842 when Hong Kong became a British colony, the population of San Francisco was some 200 souls. By 1845 Hong Kong had a population of 25,000; one year after the gold strike in 1850, San Francisco had an identical size population.

Hong Kong and San Francisco also had an uncanny visual similarity as these drawing of the two naissant cities in the late 1840’s show – Hong Kong harbour [above left] and San Francisco harbour [right].

Chiu Yu Tin aged 95

The value of Chung Woo shipments rose dramatically during the 1850s and particularly so when opium was added to regular incoming shipments to the United States. Chiu Yu Tin may have been young, but what he was engaging in was a typically Chinese business strategy of the time. He created a network of liànhǎo – a chain of traders who were trusted and who usually had either a family connection or came from the same birth town or region. Such trading chains had a complicated ownership structure not dissimilar in many ways to a form of cooperative or mutual society, each individual  keeping their own accounts with the host or main shareholder earning a premium – in this case, Chiu Yu Tin.

Although it is unclear whether Chiu’s first San Francisco operation was solely owned by him or whether he had a managing shareholding since from records it is clear that the names Chong Woo and what appears to be a sister company, Wing Wo Sang, interconnect. We do know, however, that a trading network developed under Chiu Yu Tin’s ownership that extended to Chile, Peru, Panama and much of South East Asia through his Nam Pak Hong company that traded as Kwong Mou Tai Hang. His Chinese empire stretched to include Shanghai, Shantou, Jiazhou, Dalian and Yingkou.

Chong Woo was but one of many such entrepreneurial  Chinese Hong Kong merchants who were quick to realise the potential of the burgeoning market half way around the world in California that in so many ways was a mirror image of what was happening in Hong Kong. The only difference was that Hong Kong lacked gold but the growth of affluence that occurred in both locations demanded high quality goods.

[Above] An example of a high quality circa 1890 bowl bearing the Chong Woo silver mark

In a matter of 40 years, Chiu Yu Tin managed to build an international trading empire that, as with himself, began from a humble background. Other Nam Pak Hong [literally: South-North Trading Association] merchants formed a guild in 1868 and in 1873, Chiu was nominated and elected as Chairman [shou zhongli] to the Gold Mountain Traders’ Guild.  The image of Chiu above shows him wearing his medal of office, the first to hold it.

There were many similarities between the old compradors that were required to keep the engines of Hong Kong’s fast-growing companies well oiled and running smoothly and the Nam Pak Hong. In Hong Kong, several are better known today for their silver marks and the wares that bore them. Wing Fat is one such, Wo Loong another and even the Gok brothers’ Wing On department store on Des Voeux Road operated its own allied Nam Pak Hong.

The further diversification of these international/intra-Asian merchant companies took them into the world of insurance and often into shipping. A simple item of Chinese silver ware can therefore bear a mark that can easily take one on a convoluted journey half way around the world and into trading areas that have nothing to do with silver-making. This is just one of the ways that makes Chinese Export Silver so unique – it is so often a vehicle to delve into a much richer history. What is particular relevant is the fact it was these early entrepreneurial merchants who formed the basis of the Chinese bourgeoisie and gentry in Hong Kong and San Francisco – two parallel worlds and a very new phenomenon in the Chinese social order.

In Hong Kong, however, the formation of businesses that were allied to the Nam Pak Hong principles became the very bedrock of welfare benefits for those connected with the industry as a whole. Promoting trade on a cooperative basis, assisting the military police, forward planning to deal with emergency situations and maintaining public order were all part of the group agenda of these businessmen. It was Chiu Yu Tin who pioneered this sense of community among this breed of successful Chinese businessmen. The influence of the Nam Pak Hong was to be found somewhere in virtually every public service area. This is quite remarkable, especially when this is taken within the context of the Chinese openly wishing to work hand-in-hand with the British governance of the colony.

It is said that Chiu Yu Tin was particularly generous to friends and family and that he personally helped some 1000 individuals to create businesses outside of China. Until the advent of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s, the San Francisco-Hong Kong corridor had become very much a “Maritime Silk Route” all of its own.

While Hong Kong was by no means the first Chinese diaspora community outside of China proper, San Francisco was the first significant Chinese settlement in the United States. The dualism of two cities rising together, albeit for different reasons, yet on the back of a single commodity, again different in each case, in tandem with the very powerful link that Chinese families and fellow countrymen have by nature was the cause of their success. It is not just the driving commodity, however, that creates success. Both Hong Kong and San Francisco provided Chinese entrepreneurs with a fertile ground in which they could excel without the constraints they would have had only 20 years previously in Canton under Imperial rule.

Whereas the majority of Chinese who formed the diasporic communities as we might understand them today went of their own choice, tens of thousands formed the much-overlooked indentured workers that were shipped en masse mainly to replace the void filled by the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean. Unlike the slaves they were replacing, they did have contracts with the British or American governments; in many cases the reality of their lives and treatment was almost the same as those they were replacing. In 1866, there were no fewer than 10,000 Chinese indentured workers in British Guiana alone.

However, in the early 19th century some 618 indentured Chinese workers were sent to St Helena to work on the island’s viniculture. St Helena at that time was under the governance of the East India Company; quasi British rule. Indentured labour was a solution the British devised after the abolition of slavery and in the case of St Helena Chinese young men could pay for their passage by working for a contracted period for the East India Company and were then free to work for whom they wished. Since the East India Company was initially running St Helena, there is ample documentation to show there were a significant number of artisans of various skills. These Chinese were perhaps the luckiest of all the tens of thousands of fellow countrymen who were forced through circumstances to choose the indentured route.

Silver and carved mother of pearl box depicting Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena. The box is believed to have been made towards the end of the 1820s.
Given the box does not carry any silver mark, it throws doubt on whether the box was made in Canton. As such, it suggests it could have been made in St Helena itself where one of the indentured Chinese workers may well have had silver making and ivory carving skills.

While it is doubtful the East India Company would have had the need for a silversmith to be on the island, there could well have been skilled metalworkers as well as someone who was experience in, say, ivory carving. 

Being in the South Atlantic,  there would have been access to mother of pearl, but since the East India Company’s mania for documentation was detailed enough for us to know, it is the depiction of the graveside and the landscape as a Chinese scene on the mother of pearl lid of the box [left], yet true to reality in terms of the location and the placement of the surrounding mountains that throws up a question mark. This might explain the absence of a silver mark on the box. Whatever the case, the box would be considered Chinese silver and of having unique historic significance! The presence on the island of the exiled Napoleon engendered a somewhat bizarre

Colonel Agoston Haraszthy, circa 1860

tourist trade. It became fashionable for English Georgian women to visit the island to try to  secure an audience with the former emperor. These visits are well documented as happening and Napoleon apparently revelled in them.

What is interesting about the semi-indigenous Chinese workers on the island is that around the time of the California gold rush a significant number of them managed to end their contracts by officially securing their freedom under the terms of their indenture. They then made their way to California and while some may well have been successful prospectors, the vast majority formed the core workforce behind the establishment of the Napa Valley viniculture industry. It was the acknowledged  “father of Californian Viticulture”, Colonel Agoston Haraszthy – a Hungarian immigrant, who is generally held to be responsible for introducing the Chinese into the vineyards of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

The vineyards were not the only agriculture that attracted the Chinese. By 1880, across California from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Sierra Nevada Foothills there were some twenty Chinese fruit growers apart from numerous Chinese tenant farmers.

“The Vintage in California – at Work at the Wine Presses – drawn and coloured by Paul Frenzeny – 1878
clearly showing the Chinese workers at the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma County

CONCLUSION:

Hong Kong, as with its California sister city San Francisco, was formed on a bedrock of a highly complex and interwoven social structure. Each was inter-dependent on the other and each city was founded on an economy that promulgated and, to a large extent, depended on the trade in luxury goods [in some ways one has to regard opium as a luxury trade – it was expensive and it was not vital for everyday life]. In both cities history tells of the same trail of how affluence brought the successful in face-to-face contact with those that were not. This in turn spawned a completely self-motivated desire to create a social infrastructure that brought welfare to the less fortunate and a reasonable level of safety and sense of security to those responsible for creating the infrastructure.

Chong Woo is but one of many Chinese names that appear on Chinese silver marks that was run and owned by an entrepreneurial Chinese merchant. These are the names that for so long were mistakenly considered to be “makers”.  A significant number of these merchants became involved at some stage in the opium trade. One of the few that did not was the owner of Wang Hing & Company, the Lo Family, who for almost 95 years made a point of having no connection whatsoever with the opium trade.

What other world silver category item picked up at random could have the capacity to take one on such a journey just by looking at the silver mark?

One should also possibly think of the Chinese next time one drinks a glass of Californian Pinot Grigio!

REFERENCES:

Networks Beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor; Huei-Ying Kuo, 2007, Dissertation – Binghampton University, State University of New York

Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration and the Making of Hong Kong; Elizabeth Sinn, Hong Kong University Press, 2012

Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis; David R Meyer, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Forgotten Souls – A Social History of Hong Kong Cemetery; Patricia Lim, Hong Kong University Press, 2011

The Catholic Encyclopaedia 1910 Edition.

George, Barbara B. “St Helena – the Chinese Connection” ISBN 1-899489-22

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldhansrd/text/81208-wms0003.htm

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090317/halltext/90317h0009.htm

“San Francisco in November 1849”, Geo P Putnam, New York

Haraszthy, Agoston. “Report on Grapes and Wine of California.” In Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858

Paul Frenzeny – An Artist’s Fascination with San Francisco’s Chinese Quarter, 1874-1882; Dr Claudine Chalmers & Philip P Choy, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Xingye Li, Ever-art Beijing Limited; The California Wine Museum, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, USA; California Historical Society, San Francisco; MIchael Backman Antiques, London; Case Antiques, Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Supershrink’s House of Silver;

              © Adrien von Ferscht; April 2015

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

The post THE CALIFORNIA GOLD-RUSH EFFECT ON CHINESE SILVER AND HONG KONG 加州淘金热对中国银器和香港的影响 appeared first on chinese export silver.

THE CALIFORNIA GOLD-RUSH EFFECT ON CHINESE SILVER AND HONG KONG

加州淘金热对中国银器和香港的影响     

                                           by Adrien von Ferscht 皇甫安  Translated by Chao Huang 黄超

深入研究发现，中国外销银是目前看来最复杂和最多样的银类品种，无法任取一件这种银器物而知其然，因其内涵传递的信息远比其外观要多。拾一件外销银如同握一颗手榴弹，其中满裹着各种历史、文化和艺术价值，随时准备引爆而揭开一个个秘密。

然而中国外销银长期以来背负着错误的命名，也许长达50年，或许更长时期。即使随着其需求与影响的扩大，银制品也一直并非物如其名，也从没有人给予它一个接近真相的适合头衔。我们有且仅有从史料记载的时间上判断，在18世纪末至1840年这60多年的时间里，一大批重要的新古典银相继出现，先是为了“出口市场”而生产，后则是供“国内消费”而制作。而这些银制品的制造者/主人，多以旅居中国的西方居民或新兴中国的中产阶级为主。

关于银制品制造者，笔者经过最近大量的勘校性研究后发现，一些被西方认为是“制造者”身份的人，实际上并不是制造者，而是零售银匠或零售商，并且银制品也仅仅只是其售卖的其中一种特殊商品。这众多鉴定银器标识背后的人物，在这时空中，经常能够带人进入一个无法预料的旅程，笔者本文想要介绍的，便是其中这样一个银器标识—-香港的“Chong Woo（长和）”。

“长和”标识最早可追溯到英国殖民统治早期（具体而言是1849年起），此标识虽无特别明确的样式，又往往与优质产品无关，但有其标识的银器却多为稀缺品，并且它的存在清楚地表明了曾有人懂得银器的工艺以及样式质量监控。

实际上，“长和”之名完全是虚构的名称，该标识背后的真实人物是招雨田（Chiu Yu Tin，常称招成林），14岁移民香港，是香港岛最早的移民者之一。他出生在距广州不远的南海县的一个贫苦家庭。碰巧的是，许多重要的广州零售银匠也来自佛山南海县，也就是说，招雨田很可能与银匠世家有着某些密切联系。

对于招雨田此人，我们所知道的是，在1849年，他利用赚取的钱开始开展奢侈品生意，之后便成为了一名“中国小工艺品”商人。这在1853年的香港名录中有所记载。而1849年在美国历史上同样是一个吉祥年，詹姆斯·马歇尔（James Marshall）第一次在苏特锯木厂（Sutter’s Sawmill）——也就是距离三藩市不远，如今称之为萨克拉曼多的地方——发现了金子。

随后，在香港运营开启后的1851年，来自香港的“华人长和（Chinaman Chungwoo）”的商品进入到美国三藩市。据海关条目记录，船运至于三藩市三个独立商人间的商品，总价值为426美元，包括茶、丝及其他多种品目，后来也包括有漆器、银器、家具、围巾、床罩，甚至还有女鞋。

香港在1842年成为了英国殖民地，当时三藩市的人口有大约200人。直到1854年香港拥有2.5万人口，淘金热的一年后的1850年，三藩市拥有相当的人口数量。

香港和三藩市在视觉上具有着离奇的相似度，可见于1840年末这两个新生城市——香港港口[上左图]与三藩市港口的绘画中[左图]。

“长和”船运货物的价值在1850年代急剧上涨，特别是当鸦片成为常规货物运载至美国的时候。招雨田当时虽然年轻，但他从商却是使用当时典型的中国贸易策略——他利用一群信赖度高的商人，创建了一个“联系”网络。由于网络成员常常源自同一家族或同乡，许多方面不无相似，从而导致了这样的人群间的贸易链条有着复杂的所有权结构——各成员管各自账目，由组织者或主要持股人赚取保费，这里则是指招雨田。

我们虽然不清楚第一个“长和”三藩市运营组织是否由招雨田单独持有或管理持股，但此后的记录中清晰表明“长和”之名是存在的而且它是“永和生”（Wing Wo Sang）的一个姊妹公司，两者互有贸易联系。并且我们可以肯定的是，招雨田确实控制并发展了一个“联系”网络，这个网络逐渐形成了一个相互合作的团体，再由他通过南北行（Nam Pak Hong）将业务延伸至智力、秘鲁、巴拿马和大多东南亚地区，并以广茂泰行（Kwong Mou Tai Hang）之名进行交易。

拥有香港企业家商号之一——“长和”的招雨田，之后很快意识到全世界新兴市场将会占据世界半壁江山，也发现了加州的潜力将如同镜面景象一样映射到香港的身上。而两地唯一不同之处在于香港缺金子，于是，不同富饶发展状况的两地不约而同地产生了对高质量产品的需求。

[Above] An example of a high quality circa 1890 bowl bearing the Chong Woo silver mark

[上图] 一件约产自1890年的高质量碗有“长和”的银器标识。

Chiu Yu Tin aged 95

招雨田95岁时肖像画

就这样，四十年间，招雨田凭己之力建立起了一个国际贸易帝国。其他南北行商人在1868年组建的一个行会，在1873年提名并选举招雨田为金山商人行会主席。上图是招雨田佩戴办公勋章的肖像画，其为第一个持有勋章之人。据说招雨田对朋友和亲人特别慷慨，他个人曾帮助近千人在中国以外创业。

旧买办与南北行有许多相似处，前者保持香港公司平稳运作，如同高速运转引擎需要有好的润滑剂一样。香港几个现今仍较为出名的银器及其标识依然承担着买办的角色，有“永发”（Wing Fat）、“和隆”（Wo Loong），甚至德辅道（Des Voeux Road）郭氏兄弟（Gok brothers）和“永安”（Wing On）百货。

这些国际或亚洲区域商业公司的进一步多样化，使其涉足保险业务，并常常为航运保单。简单的一件中国银器只要能够拥有一个标识，就容易引人进入一段迂回复杂的环半球旅程，并进入贸易区。然而这个过程却与银制作无关。这正是中国外销银如此独一无二的地方。它经常能够被作为一种载体而探究出更丰富的历史。事实上，与其息息相关的信息是这些早期企业家商人形成了香港和三藩市的中国中产阶级与绅士阶级，两个平行的世界在中国社会秩序中形成了全新的社会阶级现象。

但是，商业形式在香港是与南北行的规则相结合，又因产业联系而成为一个整体。以合作为基础促进贸易，协助军队警察，提升策略处理紧急情况和保持公共秩序，这些都是商人团体议程的内容。招雨田率先将这种社会认识孕育在商人之中并加以宣传指引，进而扩散影响至香港公共服务领域。这是十分值得注意的，特别是在中国公开希望与英国殖民政府携手合作的环境下。

就这样，直到1930年代美国大萧条来临以前，三藩市与香港的航线已然成为了一条独特的海上丝绸之路。

前文提到中国银匠有明确的样式，乍一看有理由猜测其为晚期版本的银来自天津涂茂兴。龙样是该银匠的典型作品。但是，这件作品有“长和”的零售标识，并与“文炜记”的工匠标识一起，可见这是一件高质量的茶壶，并且可能是一套茶具的一部分，能与咖啡器具的质量媲美。

然而，香港绝不是中国大陆领土以外第一个中国移民地，美国三藩市才是第一个中国人移民定居的城市。两个城市同步兴起，尽管有不同的原因，各属不同案例，但是各自社会背后都与中国同胞有莫大的关系，这种本质促成了他们的成功。香港与三藩市共同为中国企业家提供了肥沃的土地，在这片土地上他们能够没有任何束缚地进行贸易往来，这种经商环境超过了前20年甚至远胜于在清帝制时期下广州的经营环境。

在此过程中，大量中国人形成了移民社会，成千上万移民者成为了备受折磨的契约劳工，他们被成批船运出国，主要为了替代和填补当地非洲、美洲、加勒比海奴隶。他们虽与英国和美国政府有契约关系，身份与替代的奴隶有所不同，但很多情况下却处于与奴隶相同的命运和处境。在1866年，仅有不下1万多名中国契约劳工在英属圭亚那。

比较特殊的是，在19世纪初，618名中国契约劳工被派往圣赫勒拿（St Helena）岛上从事葡萄酿酒业。圣赫勒拿当时属东印度公司管辖，几乎是英制。这些契约劳力是为了解决英国废除奴隶制的解决方法，从圣赫勒拿的案例来看，到这里的中国年轻人能够为自身前途铺路，在契约期间为东印度公司创造财富，契约结束后便能够选择为谁工作。当时东印度公司最早运营于圣赫勒拿，丰富的档案显示当地曾有大量各种技艺的工匠。这批中国人算得上是比成千上万只能在被迫的情况下选择自己契约道路的同乡要幸运得多。

然而，不确定东印度公司是否本应在岛上需要银匠，也可能已经有工艺娴熟的金属工匠，同样有擅长象牙雕刻的人。

Silver and carved mother of pearl box depicting Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena. The box is believed to have been made towards the end of the 1820s.
Given the box does not carry any silver mark, it throws doubt on whether the box was made in Canton. As such, it suggests it could have been made in St Helena itself where one of the indentured Chinese workers may well have had silver making and ivory carving skills.

银与珍珠母贝盒雕刻描绘了圣赫勒拿的拿破仑墓。这个盒子确信是在1820年代末制成。盒子并无任何银器标识，也质疑此盒是否产于广州。虽然如此，这被认为制作于圣赫勒拿本地，其中一位中国契约劳工可能擅长银器制作和象牙雕刻。

生活在南大西洋，便有可能认识珍珠母贝，但东印度公司完备的档案记录让我们对此有全面的认识，其中坟和景观的中国景观轮廓在出现珍珠母贝的盒盖上[左图]，然而，对于该处地点和周围山脉的真实情况成为了一个疑问。这可能解释了此盒缺少银器标识的原因。无论如何，此盒确实是中国银并且具有独一无二的历史意义！此物出现在流放拿破仑的岛上，由此产生了一些离奇的旅客贸易。这对游览小岛的英国格鲁吉亚妇女来说是一种时尚，并尝试让观众不必担心前任皇帝。这些游览的发生很好的记录在档案中并且拿破仑明显对此很得意。

关于半本土中国劳工在上岛的有趣之处在于与加州淘金热的时间相仿，这些人大多数尝试解除他们的契约，希望能够在解脱契约的条款的束缚中得到自由的保障。他们选择去加州，并且有些可能成功致富，这批人则成为建立纳帕谷（Napa Valley）葡萄酿酒业背后的核心的劳动力。这些都应感谢“加州葡萄酿酒业之父”阿戈什顿•哈拉斯缇(Agoston Haraszthy)上校，全因这位匈牙利移民将中国劳工介绍进纳帕谷与索诺玛谷的葡萄园进行工作。

关于半本土中国劳工在上岛的有趣之处在于与加州淘金热的时间相仿，这些人大多数尝试解除他们的契约，希望能够在解脱契约的条款的束缚中得到自由的保障。他们选择去加州，并且有些可能成功致富，这批人则成为建立纳帕谷（Napa Valley）葡萄酿酒业背后的核心的劳动力。这些都应感谢“加州葡萄酿酒业之父”阿戈什顿•哈拉斯缇(Agoston Haraszthy)上校，全因这位匈牙利移民将中国劳工介绍进纳帕谷与索诺玛谷的葡萄园进行工作。

关于半本土中国劳工在上岛的有趣之处在于与加州淘金热的时间相仿，这些人大多数尝试解除他们的契约，希望能够在解脱契约的条款的束缚中得到自由的保障。他们选择去加州，并且有些可能成功致富，这批人则成为建立纳帕谷（Napa Valley）葡萄酿酒业背后的核心的劳动力。这些都应感谢“加州葡萄酿酒业之父”阿戈什顿•哈拉斯缇(Agoston Haraszthy)上校，全因这位匈牙利移民将中国劳工介绍进纳帕谷与索诺玛谷的葡萄园进行工作。

Colonel Agoston Haraszthy, circa 1860

阿戈什顿•哈拉斯缇上校（约1860年）

葡萄园不是唯一吸引中国劳工进入的农业场所。到1880年，整个加州从三藩市湾区(Bay Area)到内华达山脉山麓（Sierra Nevada Foothills），众多的中国佃农中有20个中国果农。

“The Vintage in California – at Work at the Wine Presses – drawn and coloured by Paul Frenzeny – 1878
clearly showing the Chinese workers at the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma County

加州葡萄丰收- 压制普通的劳作” 1878年由保罗·夫仁泽尼绘画和填色，清晰显示中国工人在索诺玛县的布埃纳文图拉酒厂

结论

香港作为加州三藩市的姊妹城市，其基础形成于一个高度复杂与交织的社会结构中。彼此间相互依靠，两座城市的形成和经济发展都有很大相似，很大程度上依靠奢侈品贸易，某些情况下还需要鸦片作为一种奢侈品贸易。两座城市的历史述说了相同境遇下，富饶如何伴随成功迎面而来，影响默默无闻并落后的城市。这是由自我激励欲望去创建社会基础的进程，将福利带到较少运气的地方，将适当安全层次和保证意识带到那些有责任创建基础的地方的发展道路。

“长和”无疑是诸多中国商号名称之一，出现中国银器标识中，它是由一个中国企业家商号运营和持有。这些银器标识长期被误认为是“制造者”。这些商号中很多都与鸦片贸易有关，也有一些并不涉及，宏兴公司的持有者罗氏家族就与之无关。近乎95年中，并没有一些迹象显示其与鸦片贸易有任何联系。

随机拾起其他世界银类品目，观其银器标识，还能够再进行一次如此的穿越时空之旅吗？

下次当我们品尝一杯加州灰皮諾葡萄酒时，或许会想起这位中国人。

参考文献

Networks Beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor; Huei-Ying Kuo, 2007, Dissertation – Binghampton University, State University of New York

Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration and the Making of Hong Kong; Elizabeth Sinn, Hong Kong University Press, 2012

Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis; David R Meyer, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Forgotten Souls – A Social History of Hong Kong Cemetery; Patricia Lim, Hong Kong University Press, 2011

The Catholic Encyclopaedia 1910 Edition.

George, Barbara B. “St Helena – the Chinese Connection” ISBN 1-899489-22

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldhansrd/text/81208-wms0003.htm

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090317/halltext/90317h0009.htm

“San Francisco in November 1849”, Geo P Putnam, New York

Haraszthy, Agoston. “Report on Grapes and Wine of California.” In Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858

Paul Frenzeny – An Artist’s Fascination with San Francisco’s Chinese Quarter, 1874-1882; Dr Claudine Chalmers & Philip P Choy, 2012

致谢

李星晔, 北京午行文化发展有限公司 Xingye Li, Ever-art Beijing Limited; The California Wine Museum, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, USA; California Historical Society, San Francisco; Michael Backman Antiques, London; Case Antiques, Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Supershrink’s House of Silver

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

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CHINESE SILVER-MAKING HAS JEWISH ROOTS

Ongoing research at the Chinese Silver Research Centre [CSRI] at Tsinghua University, Beijing is furthering its focus on the Jewish merchants and actual silversmiths from Sassania [modern day Iran] who plied the Silk Road for centuries, introducing the art of silver-making to China. Chinese silver retained a definitive “persian” influence until the Sung Dynasty. Silver then acquired a “Chinese Style” and this coincides with the settling of a significant number of Sassanian Jews in Kaifeng fu.

Many of these Jews became assimilated Chinese through inter-marriage that was both allowed and encouraged by the Sung. 21 Chinese family names that exist today can trace their roots to Kaifeng fu; at least one Chinese Jewish silversmith still operates a workshop in Kaifeng fu today.

http://chinese-export-silver.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Chinese-silver-making-has-Jewish-roots.pdf

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

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Sino-Victoriana 中国-维多利亚时期

From the mid 19th century, Chinese Export Silver spawned a decorative style that encapsulated the exuberance of a combination of two cultures, the very era itself and the vibrancy that was the China Trade. This made for a unique and interesting mix – the bringing together of these otherwise highly unlikely bedfellows created a force that was to be reckoned with; a force that manifested itself in a decorative style that has since faded into an obscurity it does not deserve, albeit it was not a style one could live with for an extended period of time.

How one describes such an indomitable force is no easy task. While excesses in decorative styles are not a new phenomenon, they are usually the result of a logical evolutionary process. Certainly the rococo and baroque periods would comply with this theory while one could certainly track the development of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements in all their guises. Sino-Victoriana somewhat contrarily burst upon the scene as if it were one giant firework suddenly exploding. Given China is the home of the firework, perhaps the sudden arrival of this style was perfectly in character.

Less is more’ was never part of the vocabulary of the 19th century Chinese silversmiths and if I were seeking a worthy comparable that was a contemporary of those times, I would probably look towards ladies’ millinery of the day – pure confection.

The Tsarina Alexandra Feodoravna [above] is seen here wearing what was, for her, a modest day wear concoction in stark comparison to one of her court ladies [right] who was endeavouring to make a slightly less subtle statement.

In another Imperial Court much closer to home, the indomitable Dowager Empress Cixi was also not known for her simple head wear, albeit “simple” is always relative to an incumbent context – her normal day wear apparel often defied gravity!

Towards the late 18^th century, as a result of a vastly reduced amount of raw silver coming from South American mines due to the Mexican fight for independence, Western silversmiths experienced hardship in accessing supplies of silver as well as hugely inflated prices. This ironically coincided with an unprecedented growth of the affluent middle classes across Europe, but particularly in England. It did not take the wily merchants involved in trade with Canton to realize that “Georgian” silver could be made by Chinese silversmiths at a fraction of the cost English silversmiths were forced to charge. The cost factor was obviously an attraction but more relevantly was the fact that Canton makers could produce the fashionable neo-classical silver at a level of workmanship equal to the finest silversmiths working in London. This new phenomenon was mirrored in Boston in Massachusetts.

It was this style of silver in conjunction with the fact it was, for the first time, being made specifically for export that the term “Chinese Export Silver” was coined. Virtually none of this silver was made for consumption by Chinese buyers.

While a significant amount of early Chinese Export Silver was restrained within the confines of the Western neo-classical style, it was the eventual signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 that proved to be the catalyst for Chinese silversmiths to vent their collective frustrated creative bent in what was to be an explosion of silver extravaganzas. In the space of just forty years, Chinese silversmiths took the giant leap from creating a neo-classical lidded jug as the previously illustrated WE WE WC piece to the Luen Wo lidded standing cup below.

The trophy, as an item of silver, was almost a god-given gift to Chinese silversmiths. It provided them with a blank canvas to create increasingly more extrovert expressions of their fertile creative minds, their obvious sense of humour and their extraordinary artisanal skills.

The amount of commemorative trophy items that was created in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the latter half of the 19th century was extraordinary, but so was the number of institutions and clubs that mushroomed in these two cities alone as a result of a Victorian colonial lifestyle. While commemorative silver did not exclusively manifest as lidded standing cups, the end result invariably became cornucopias that overflowed and cascaded with fantastical silver scrolls and curlicues.

By the latter part of the 19^th century, it could be said that the momentum of the growth in wealth creation in Hong Kong and Shanghai superseded that of most European and American cities. As with anywhere, wealth doesn’t automatically breed good taste and perhaps it was the lack of restrictions Western society placed on what might be acceptable or not that resulted in an over-exuberance that was particularly prevalent in presentation silver made for “home consumption”.

This colonial style became a strange mélange of the rococo, traditional allegorical Chinese decorative motifs and the English high Victorian style. It was vastly different from the style employed for silver pieces in England and America, yet the pieces obviously made for Chinese settlements we obstinately insist on referring to today as “Export Silver” – an oxymoron if ever there was one.

Over the 155-year manufacturing period of what we now call Chinese Export Silver there was a great fluidity of styles. In many ways the style spectrum wheel travelled full circle, beginning with the somewhat staid neo-classical and moving into the Victorian era which manifested in an almost organic series of changes that veered to the theatrical, into the 20^th century with a rejection of exuberance for the cleaner lines that marked the new modern era – Art Nouveau, ending with what some would consider a 20^th century form of classicism, the Art Deco.

The inherent theatricality of traditional Chinese decorative motifs made a happy and in most cases a natural marriage with the high Victorian style – a style that threw all previous notions of preserving the integrity of established form and design to the wind and simply piling them together.

Much of mid to late Victorian architecture can resemble a wedding cake – layers that travel through architectural timelines that can present Jacobean, Byzantine, Romanesque and Rococo in one single façade. The concept of theatricality is built upon fantasy and to an over-exuberant Chinese silversmith that also has a somewhat wicked sense of humour, the Sino-Victorian style must have been a dream come true. The previously illustrated standing cup that carries the silver mark of the Canton merchant silversmith Khecheong carries a plethora of classical Chinese motifs around an extremely busy battle scene all carried on and within what is essentially a neo-classical form, albeit with a fair degree of artistic license.

Sino-Victoriana had no rules other than somewhere underneath the “icing sugar” decoration one will invariably find a neo-classical form.

The “Tientsin Cup” in the previous illustration is testament to this. Carrying the Tuck Chang merchant mark, this spirited piece of silver plays to the one-upmanship that lies behind the motivation of why anyone would feel the need to present such a cup at a high profile public event such as a race meet.

It is all about status and showing it on one’s sleeve. “Shy” and “retiring” were not words in the nouveau riche Victorian lexicon; Victorians have not gone down in history for their subletly!

The Victorian façade of Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Station in London begins with the Byzantine, travels through the neo-Gothic to the Italianate to be topped by a French Mansard roof – the Scottish baronial tower, a mere bauble to set it all off. It is a fruit salad of a building architecturally but it is also a show-stopper. The Midland Railway Company that commissioned it unabashedly stated “It was intended to make a grand statement about the Company with a display of physical magnificence”.

Does that sound familiar?

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

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Nobody can dispute that the awareness of Chinese Export Silver has grown exponentially in the past five years; there’s also far more of it appearing in auction house sales – but is the understanding of it there?

Chinese Export Silver is, by default, an extremely complex silver category and it is only recently that it has become sufficiently unravelled for a true understanding of it to begin to develop. Until recently the general rule of thumb was that the majority of Chinese silver appearing in auction houses was of good quality, some of it exceptional, while the lesser items were more likely to be found on e-commerce platforms. In the past year this ballgame has changed dramatically and one of the most challenging reasons is the appearance of fake or pseudo items.

Until a year ago Chinese silver was virtually a fake-free zone in the West. After a gradual appearance of the odd item here and there, today there is a virtual flood of items that mainly set out to beguile the audience with historical facts, attributes and marks that attest to them being special, most of the claims being  spurious – and that’s being kind! There have even been instances where counterfeit items that have been acquired online have re-appeared in mainstream auction house sales, some in houses that quite frankly should have known better – I shall remain kind and refrain from naming and shaming them.

Unlike auction houses that have experts, most online platforms have none.  It is possible to offer ‘antique’ Chinese silver items for sale supported by descriptions that many will find perfectly plausible, when in reality they are anything but. The absence of administrative control on content or the inability or unwillingness to do so simply because it would be almost impossible to implement effectively has created a new minefield for prospective Chinese silver buyers or even seasoned collectors to tackle. It has also provided sellers with an wide-open window of opportunism.

The new reality of factories in China churning out Chinese silver “antiques ready-to-go” as we speak is alarming. These are not small workshops – they are large-scale production factories that in many cases produce high quality items – they just happen to be hot off the press rather than the “late 19th century” which often, as if by magic, is claimed to be their birthright.

Chinese Porcelain Reproduction Market, Pan Jiayuan, Chaoyang District, Beijing

While silver has not attained the vast levels of production that the present-day factories in Jingdezhen achieve with “antique” Chinese porcelain goods, silver production is now an industry that has the ability to threaten the integrity of what once was a gentlemanly pursuit. The said factories are tantamount to being 21st century antique terrorists! I am reminded of the time my good friend Lars Tharp regaled me with a  tale of a visit by him a few years ago to Jingdezhen where he encountered an establishment called “The Antique Chinese Porcelain Factory”. At the time I thought it highly amusing, and still do, perhaps buoyed by being confident that the Lars Tharps of this world were more than capable of spotting the ugly duckling in a Chinese porcelain beauty parade; the same cannot be said for the world of Chinese silver. 

Beijing Antique City, Chaoyang District, Beijing – over 4000 “antique shops”.

Anyone who has visited China recently is probably aware of the vast amount of jade and pearls that are claimed to be authentic. One of newest kids on the block on the fake block is amber. So masterful are the fake amber pieces, even expert eyes are challenged. When confronted with colossal multi-storey shopping malls devoted almost entirely to the art of high quality fakery, it is enough to reduce even the most seasoned expert’s confidence to an all-time low.

The set of 4 silver goblets are listed as being “Chinese export silver 4 cups DRAGON & SACRED PEARLS OF WISDOM Wax Seals Antique” – they also state that “each of the 4 pieces has a wax export duty seal”. The rather spurious wax seal states “Jian Ding 20 鉴定二〇。” alluding to an “Identification 20” – no such mark, no such seal and no such wording would have been used on authentic Chinese silver of the 19th or even pre-Revolution 20th century.

Probably the only true part of the the two statements is “Chinese export silver”, or at least I think that is so.  They have been exported, albeit recently, but as for the silver, it is untested – none of the goblets carry a silver mark but the brains behind these items has opted to add wax seals in order to evoke “authenticity. The seal actually masks the fact these goblets have not been made in the traditional 19th century manner with the stem and base being secured by a quatrefoil-shaped nut screwed to a central screw shaft. The seals sadly cannot mask the obvious machine marks of the goblet interiors. The goblets are nothing but a bad a pastiche of the type of goblet [right] sold at Christie’s, Paris with full silver marks on each item.

The “antique terrorists” responsible for these fakes may be clever – they make even be skilful, but one thing that is virtually impossible to replicate is the grey colour quality and the soft, slightly soapy feel that antique Chinese silver has. Comparing the pastiche goblets with the Christie’s examples, the former have a bright, almost chromium colouring and the applied dragons of the set of 6 are far crisper, more defined and  accomplished.

Despite the dramatic rise of awareness of Chinese silver, the disparity of understanding of it between China and the West widens. Where Chinese collectors have little focus or interest in the retail marks, Western collectors and even most Asian art experts still insist on referring to the retailers as “the makers”, with many a description of an object waxing lyrical about their renowned workshops  – none of these names had workshops; the majority of the names were fictitious. On the other side of the coin, the very small group of true Chinese connoisseurs that exist understand the individual merits and idiosyncrasies of the master artisan silversmiths whose names can only be known by reading the Chinese character “chopmarks”. This is how it should be and just as it is perfectly natural we can know and understand the painters of the Royal Worcester factory, familiarity of the Chinese artisan silversmiths in conjunction with the house styles demanded by each retail silversmith is the only way this highly complex silver category can be understood. Only armed with this familiarity can one hope to battle the new wave of “antique terrorists”.

The “bargain basement” end of the fake silver market is probably the most prolific, with silver vases parading in their hundreds, often in pairs and many bearing marks that never existed outside of this fantasy world. Fantasy is probably being kind – they all have more affinity to the Hammer House of Horrors than to authentic antique Chinese silver.

These vases are often referred to as “marked palace vases”, they are described as being several kilos in weight and they are invariably decorated in an exaggerated version of traditional Chinese motifs that appear almost cartoon-like against the real thing.

The Chinese online selling platform Alibaba is awash with this ghastly silver but they have also infiltrated Western online sites and have been known to appear in European and American auction houses.

The is what appears to be an entire genus of so-called Chinese silver that masquerades under the umbrella category of “Ming Xuande” [below left]. These pieces all carry the same style of silver mark [below right] – such marks never existed in the real world. Consisting mainly of pairs of tall vases and censers, this totally false silver often commands relatively high prices and, even more frighteningly, seem to sell.  It seems to be particularly prevalent on American-based sites.

Chinese Export Silver items have appeared at auctions of what are regarded as the more premium auction houses posturing as “early” examples of this silver category.

Silver vases have appeared carrying silver marks that attest to being silver along with a date or dynasty mark. Sometimes the actual mark is impressed upon a circular button-shaped lozenge that is then inserted into the base of an item [below left]. The left-hand mark below is aiming to inform us that the maker is Qi Sheng and it was made during the Qing Kangxi period [1662-1722]. The right-hand mark below states “Imperial Made Qing Dynasty”. Marks such as these were never used in Chinese silver – the plug mark on the left is so obviously not over 300 years old.

E-commerce antique sites are also plagued with sellers who are either blissfully ignorant or they are blatant opportunists hoping for a ride on what they perceive as a bandwagon. This seller-genre has it’s own rule book – if an item of silver looks Chinese or it carries a mark that looks as if it is Chinese, then it becomes a member of that ill-presumed magical club – Chinese Export Silver.

Obviously well-executed and of high quality, this silver box [below] was described as “A Rare Stunning Chinese Export Silver Box With Figures 19th Century”. It is all of those things other than it is not Chinese – the box carries an 800 silver mark; no Chinese silver ever carried an 800 mark. The nearest country to China that did is Japan.

The box was offered for auction on eBay, so there no checks and balances on the authenticity or integrity of this particular posting exist other than the “refund guarantees” eBay offers , but to benefit from that one would assumedly have to understand how and why this item might not be what it purports to be.

It is unfortunate that these would-be Chinese Export Silver “hopefuls” so often either carry a fixed price or they achieve a price consistent with that of a high quality Chinese Export Silver item. The following intricately reticulated box carries a “Buy it Now” price tag of £3500 on eBay and is described as being “A Rare Chinese Canton Export Solid Silver Pierced Repoussé Figural Box”. Sadly it probably has not seen Canton, it doesn’t carry any maker’s identity mark other than a single 800 mark, assuming this is a mis-stamped mark. It also happens not to be “figural”.

While versions of this style of box proliferated towards the very end of the 19th century and the early 20th century in Siam [Thailand]. They invariably carried silver marks of Thai Chinese silversmiths. The combination of the interior of this box and the somewhat spurious silver mark make this box highly suspect and almost certainly a modern take on the 100 year old boxes that still abound – which all makes the £3500 asking price steep, to say the least.

The welding on the interior of the lid is quite shoddily executed and what is trying to be artistic repoussé and pierce work was probably stamped out mechanically leaving quite sharp edges.

An opportunist – or simply a total silver novice? One has to wonder sometimes. But to jump to the assumption that because a hallmark is not clear enough to be read it has to be a “faux hallmark” and as such has to be early Chinese Export Silver is a jump to far!

This “Chinese Export Silver Muffineer” is about as Chinese as I am!  But to date this piece as an example early 19th century Chinese Export Silver is being just a tad too hopeful.

This is simply English silver with a rubbed or badly struck date and city marks.

“A very rare and fine 19TH century, Qing era, Chinese Export Antique Solid Silver Filigree Snuff Bottle set with Coral, Turquoise and Lapis Lazuli stones” is how the following item is described online. It is also “exquisite and finely made with filigree details around the should of the bottle and classic shape with decorated lid shoulders and both sides set with 82 individually set semi precious stones” – all very lyrical but this is artistic license several steps too far.

The bottle [left] is conveniently unmarked, brand new, not Chinese and highly likely is not set with semi precious stones. A bargain at $450! Someone obviously thinks so!!

The internet is awash with “pseudo-Chinese bejewelled filigree gewgaws” [official dictionary meaning: a showy thing, especially one that is useless or worthless].

There are several factories in China churning these items out. They appear on almost every antique e-commerce site, invariably described as being 19th century along with attendant hyperboles. What is frightening is they also regularly appear in mainstream auction sales, but the most disturbing thing is they sell as if they are some intricate 19th century work of art at prices that never fail to astound. It is one thing for the collecting public to be gullible, but for “experts” to continually be duped into this 19th century fantasy is reprehensible.

Described as “Chinese ritual canister intricately decorated in silver, mesh ground, and enamelled prunus trees, and birds of paradise in vibrant colours of blue, green and red. Mounted turquoise stones dot the panelled scene. Fashioned in four, curved panels and conforming bulbous panels on lid, this complexly crafted piece is highlighted with a gem, jadeite collar, and the lid with finial, opens revealing a gold wash interior. Hallmark on bottom: SILVER”, the internet has an infestation of such items – this particular example [right] is in an actual auction sale. Usually such canister are claimed to be “19th century” or “1800s” – there’re several known factories in China producing these items and all are marked “SILVER” [below]. No 19th or early 20th century Chinese silver was marked so; if it had the word “silver”, then it would be accompanied by a retailer’s mark and probably a silver purity mark.

Does this mark really look 100 years old? I don’t think so!

The activities of Antique terrorists has reached a critical stage – they are the ISIL of the antiques world.  E-commerce and e-payment guarantees are fine but they are only helpful if the reality of what these items actually are can be proven. Other e-commerce platforms vary in the guarantees they claim to offer and their efficacy in terms of the buyer protection. An online war of words between a seller that is highly likely to be China-based and a disputing buyer will often lead nowhere since it is extremely difficult to legally prove that some of the descriptions are, in fact, either incorrect or false. Banning the bandits from the sites is next to useless – they appear under a different identity within minutes.

Mainstream auction houses are meant to have the in-house expertise to efficiently put in place a security fence that either rejects these items or to be able to describe them precisely. To do this effectively, their radars need to be attuned to high alert and a general complacency that so often is masked by an outward self-assurance needs to be dealt with.

Chinese silver is a highly complex world silver category and there are a huge amount of 18th, 19th and early 20th century manufacturing period pieces still in circulation. The reality is that few auction houses truly understand Chinese silver and are particular ill-equipped to recognise and adequately identify the outstanding items just as much as there is a likelihood 21st century “antiques” might miraculously become 19th century.

E-commerce platforms are a gift and a curse in equal quantities. There is a huge amount of highly collectible and, in some instances, superb Chinese silver items on offer. Without adequate understanding by all parties, this can be a minefield. Equally, the deluge of pseudo-antiques hot off the production lines in China taints a silver category that is deserving of respect and deserving of academic study.

We live in a big bad world. Why would antique Chinese silver be a safe haven? As with everything else, we simply have to be more circumspect, more aware and more street-smart.

Adrien von Ferscht 皇甫安 [Huangfu An]

adrien.vonferscht@glasgow.ac.uk

© 2015, Adrien von Ferscht. All rights reserved.

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Few categories of antiques are immune to fakery; copies that manifest in varying degrees of passable authenticity, or at least at first glance. Fakes, replicas, copies – whatever one wishes to call them, have existed almost as long as the real thing and it’s been so for centuries and Chinese artisans have been considered the best at what is arguably an art in itself. The 21st century, however, has brought with it an new phenomenon that has created a sea-change in the world of antiques in all its guises; e-commerce.  The dramatic rise in e-commerce platforms have seriously challenged established auction houses and antique dealers [and collectors] to such an extent that the age-old accepted way they have operated is challenged. The big issue, though, is that most e-commerce platforms impose no challenge to descriptions that are obviously mis-leading, or at least to the experts.

The world of e-commerce changes at such a fast pace it is nigh impossible for established auction houses to devise ways to combat this in ways that their equally established clientele would find acceptable and  appropriate for an auction house or up-market dealer to behave. This fragile equation is further complicated by the fact the majority of their clientele are probably not averse to making e-commerce acquisitions, a not insignificant proportion of which appear at mainstream auctions at a later date. This, though, is where one would expect reputable auction houses’ radars to pick up the warning signals such pieces emit; sadly, this is rarely the case.

Chinese ceramics have long been afflicted with fakery. Serious collectors have developed their own methods to determine authenticity, none more so than the Chinese themselves. When I first began researching the silver category generally known as ‘Chinese Export Silver’ some eight years ago, fake items of this silver were almost non-existent; values, however, were relatively low at that time. This reality no longer exists. The past three years have seen an increasing sophistication, if you will, in the quality and appearance of copies to the extent that workshops and even entire factories exist solely for the production of what could now be considered a parallel industry; I have personally seen some of these factories. Copies are no longer exclusive to Qing Dynasty silver; in the past two years items have consistently appeared for sale, some of them in highly reputable selling situations, that are replicating items of silver from very early Qing as well as late Ming reigns. To an experienced eye, most should be detectable, many being almost too good to be true.

Chinese export silver, or what I far prefer to call Qing Dynasty silver since it far more accurately describes the actual silver objects that generally fall within this category, is probably the most mis-understood silver category on the planet; despite popular opinion, it is also one of the largest silver categories since it was produced over 285 years involving up to 50,000 silversmiths, artisans and workshops operating across that period. Even with a substantial amount being destroyed in the late 19th century and 20th century for a variety of reasons, a huge amount remains and it keeps up a steady appearance in the general market. It also happens to be a silver category that is perceived completely differently in the West than it is in China by the growing number of Chinese collectors and experts; a difference that the West barely recognises, if at all.

When I first began my research, not one mainstream auction house deemed the silver to be of significant importance. To my knowledge, to this day no auction house has a dedicated expert for this silver category and in instances where a silver department exists, those silver experts will invariably refer to marks that appear on English or in Latin initials as being the “maker’s mark”; the reality is that mark will almost always be a retailer’s mark and the true maker’s mark when it appears will be in Chinese characters, often referred to as the chop-mark. The growing number of Chinese collectors, however, will usually ignore the retailer’s mark as being irrelevant [to them] and will not only be able to read the maker’s marks, but also distinguish those which they deem as being more “collectible” and by default command a much higher value.

This dichotomy of perception, understanding and appreciation of the silver already presents a very complex and probably unique situation. Enter into that equation the fact that certain items of this silver have the capability of achieving unusually high values and then factor in the existence of fakes that require its own specialised knowledge to detect, Western auction houses and dealers should find themselves being in a dangerously weakened position; a position that seems not yet to have been fully realised, if at all.

While there was a provincial pride in American China Trade cities that assumed that goods owned by the old merchant families came directly from China to their towns or city and remained there, this was not necessarily the case. It is safer to regard Philadelphia as having been a distribution point for as much as one third of all the China goods entering America at the time. Some of these goods would have found their way to commission merchants, some to retail silversmiths, some directly to dockside auctions. What it does demonstrate is how these goods and the China Trade itself became an important historical marker of the new nation and most importantly to become an integral part of early American cultural heritage.

Academics who have an affinity to the decorative arts are often faced with the dilemma whether an important item is made all the more remarkable if it commands a high value or whether that high price enhances its significance. The answer is probably in the affirmative to the former but despite the fact the Wanli silver censer [above] succeeded in attracting a final bid in excess of $700,000, the relevance the censer has in establishing a new understanding for the subsequent Qing Dynasty silver genus is simply beyond value; it is tantamount to discovering a long-lost strand of the DNA of the Qing Dynasty silver genus, tantamount to a eureka moment. It is perhaps most relevant to highlight the fact the censer was sold in a Hong Kong auction, having been part of a mainland China beauty parade prior to crossing into Hong Kong.

In China, the use of e-commerce sites is far more widely used than in the West. In the larger cities in China, cash is already almost redundant.  Alibaba have created ‘Rural Tiaobao’, an ambitious effort to turn China’s 600 million rural residents into online shoppers — and, most importantly sellers. Alibaba is getting a big helping hand from the government, which is footing the bill to renovate actual [as opposed to virtual] storefronts in rural areas, sending officials out to talk up e-commerce to once skeptical farmers, providing gratis space for new logistics centres and deploying propaganda workers to promote Rural Taobao. The ministries of commerce and finance have allocated $300 million to 200 rural counties to spend on warehouses, training and anything else that might push the project forward. This is now revolutionising entire villages – Rural Taobao is helping farmers sell their produce at higher prices and to buy things more cheaply; rural entrepreneurship is a new and fast-spreading reality. Dedicated local appointed agents help their technology-challenged neighbours to buy fertiliser, TVs and even electric cars that are specially made for the Chinese rural market on the Alibaba rural shopping site.   The same agent arranges the payments as well as delivery and earns a commission from the sellers. This is dramatically changing the wealth dynamic of the rural poor; this, in a country that already has an affluent middle class greater than the entire population of the United States.

Alibaba’s research arm estimates online consumption in rural China will reach RMB 1 trillion by 2020; Alibaba recognised the problem, created a solution and implanted it in less than one year. Alibaba will invest 10 billion yuan to build 100,000 Taobao service centres in remote areas and expand logistics and training to bring villages up to speed for how to Taobao-ize their economy. The central government has signed agreements with both Alibaba and Jingdong [JD.com], another major platform, to spur e-commerce development in the name of poverty alleviation. Taobao “entrepreneurs” [for that is how they see themselves] have already started put feelers out across Asia and even to America. Where communist slogans still abound in rural districts, farmers swap their tractors for Audis. China’s online shopping revolution has created hundreds of ‘Taobao villages’ – farming communities transformed by the Alibaba consumer-to-consumer site of the same name; a whole different kind of communism, if you will.

Meanwhile, back at the Western auction world, an entirely new ‘species’ of so-called Chinese export silver items proliferates. Posing as “18th or 19th century” and even “Ming”, often sporting pastiche dynasty marks that border on being ludicrous, they range from silver gilt filigree [actually factory-made mesh] and enamel pieces to a vast array of silver wares that have no comparable pedigree in the real world.

This new-born genre is exactly that; hot-off-the-press of factories and workshops that are geared up to spew them out; so obviously gaudy and not authentic in any way, yet they are selling for not inconsequential sums of money. Almost every item is obviously new, or at least to an expert, however experts in the true silver genus are very thin on the ground. Apart from the mainstream auction circuits, the fake items particularly thrive on the Western e-commerce platforms where sadly virtually no attempt is made to verify authenticity. E-commerce platforms, however, have developed their own hierarchy; we have those that have evolved specifically for a more up-market clientele, while others are geared more to a mass market. Sadly, though, the lack of authenticity control remains, in the main, equal, but more worryingly the ability or desire for auction houses and dealers to recognise them should set warning lights flashing. It is almost tantamount to the reticence of social media platforms to take real responsibility for filtering out “fake news; those platforms have their cake and can eat it, while the platform users are left to fend for themselves in the equivalent of a digital minefield. Add to the hazard the appearance of so-called auction houses that seem to have their whole reason for being rooted in offering articles of dubious provenance and age; allusions to items being part of “estates” that themselves are fictitious are not uncommon in a bid to elevate their pedigree, is just one example of a new generation of auction boxes of tricks.

Back in China, the most populous nation on earth and one that is probably the most open to embrace a digital world, it verges on the frightening for a Western visitor to equate the extent of this digital acceptance to anything that comes anywhere near it back in the West. China is creating almost all the new precedents and benchmarks in this new parallel virtual world  and is doing so at a momentum approaching the unstoppable force of a tsunami. Chinese people also seem to have the ability to be generally more street smart with regard to digital information and how it is purveyed.

China Guardian, the smaller of the “big two” Chinese auction houses open its new headquarters  only two blocks away from the Tiananmen Square side of the Forbidden City any day now; known as the Guardian Art Centre, it is the world’s first museum and auction house hybrid that includes the wholly integral 120-room Puxuan Beijing Hotel & Spa whose main function is to cater for China Guardian’s most prestigious domestic and international clientele.

Yet again, the Chinese are raising the bar and even though relatively speaking China Guardian remains a small-fry in the global pond of auction houses, Guardian are obviously on a whole new mission to challenge the establishment of the auction world; this, after all, is a minnow that also happens to own a substantial tranche of Sotheby’s shares. Anyone who has ever attended a China-Guardian preview in the past 18 months will have detected a marked upward trajectory in style, presentation, quality of offering and achieved values. China Guardian has also been quietly populating its corridors with world-class experts. The Guardian Art Centre is a whole new Chinese auction hybrid; auction house, luxury hotel and spa, convention and auction space, art storage and conservation space, educational institute and publishing house all under one roof in a district where only the largest Ming palace in the world and vast forbidding government office complexes have ruled up until now.

China Guardian is also known to be actively looking for new innovative ways to present art and artefacts to the world; virtual reality is but one of the new technologies being investigated.

The West is lagging embarrassingly behind, meanwhile Chinese generated fakery is undermining the integrity of a world that has not yet even begun to play catch up in the West, let alone get its house in order to stop the incessant march of the fakes. Lagging behind seems to be the one thing the West is good at; how many Western nations have truly climbed aboard the One Road, One Belt initiative? The auction house bar, meanwhile, continues on its rapid upward trajectory, as do most other Chinese-led initiatives.

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Adrien von Ferscht is one of the only academics actively working on research of Chinese export silver of the Qing dynasty; research that is carried out within the context of the 2200-year history of Chinese silver-making. He is an Academic Committee Member of the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture at Beijing Normal University and is a Lead Researcher at Tsinghua University, Beijing.  His Definitive Collectors’ Guide for Chinese Export Silver is widely used by auction houses and dealers around the world. His academic home base is Glasgow.

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There is no set like it; nothing that even comes faintly near it. It is an extensive 47-piece suite of Chinese tea wares made entirely of filigree silver-gilt overlay, most pieces having a solid silver-gilt inner form. It was probably created in the latter part of the 18th century, the likelihood being that Canton was the place of manufacture. It remained hidden from public view, probably never ever having been used, for most of its life. It first appeared under the radar, so to speak, when, in 2011, Sotheby’s, Amsterdam announced a particularly special sale – namely the property from the estate of the late Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in mid-March that year.

As the sale catalogue implied, no provenance could be found in the royal archives at the Hague as to how this set came into the Dutch royal household. Recent dialogue with the archive confirmed this. Some speculation in the description for Lot 398 alluded to a possible connection with Anna Paulovna, Princess of Orange, yet no real forensic investigation ensued at the time. In order to shed a more certain light on what is undoubtedly a highly important and probably unique collection of 18th century Chinese silver, forensics is the only logical route one can take.

Anna Paulovna was born in the right century to have some connection with this tea ware, but her year of birth, 1795, makes little sense when applied to the style and obvious Chinese provenance of the set.  She was the eighth child of Emperor Paul I of Russia and Maria Feodorovna [Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg], the Emperor being the only son of Catherine the Great and one whose fathering was a constant point of discussion [Sergei Saltykov, Catherine the Great’s lover at the time, was often considered the father]. Anna, meanwhile, became something of a hot potato in Europe in her mid teens having been turned down by none other than Napoleon, the future Ferdinand I of Austria and several other high-ranking notables until her brother chose William, Prince of Orange to be her suitor.

The most obvious possible link to the tea ware in this already complicated European equation would be Catherine the Great. She not only had a passion for all things Chinese and was instrumental in bringing the Enlightenment to Russia, but she was known to have had a long-term ongoing correspondence with the Emperor Qianlong. Catherine also had a long-lasting obsession with the style that became known as the Chinoiserie.

which was prevalent across much of Europe in the mid-18th century in parallel to Qianlong’s equal obsession with the Euroiserie style. It is also known that Catherine the Great had an extensive collection of Chinese filigree silver-gilt accessories in her personal dressing room [above]; many of the items were a somewhat strange hybrid fusion of traditional Chinese and European baroque and rococo styles and motifs. The probable date of these items is circa 1765-70. Catherine also had a substantial Chinese Theatre built at Tsarskoye Selo and an elaborate Chinese bridge erected across the Krestovy Canal that led directly to it; she also had several entire rooms in the Chinoiserie style at the estate, so much so that together they became known as the ‘Chinese village’.

Catherine II’s son Pavel Petrovich became a widower in 1775 after only five years of marriage to Natalia Alexeievna. Being heir, it was necessary for Paul to find a new wife. Empress Catherine and Frederick II of Prussia, together chose the Duchess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg; she had grown up in the same place as Catherine and had a remarkably similar education. In 1776 she and Paul were married in St Petersburg, she adopting the Russian name of Maria Feodorovna. It is highly likely 1776 also saw the manufacture of the Chinese tea wares in question and it is equally likely, given their particular Chinese style and obvious suitability for partaking of both black and  

green teas, they were a marriage gift to Paul and Maria Fedorovna from the Emperor Qianlong himself; a tribute gift, if you will.

In the mid-18th century, the marking of silver in China [or at least in Canton, as opposed to the Imperial Workshops in Beijing] was not yet customary. In all the 2200 years of silver-making in China, there never existed a formal assay system or any obligation to mark silver. However, the most likely silversmith the tea wares could be attributed to is Bao Ying. He was also very likely to have been the maker of some, if not all, the items now to be found in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Several items bearing a somewhat primitive Bao Ying scratch mark are known to exist, including this pair of lidded silver-gilt filigree urns [above] which are again a fusion of the baroque and traditional Chinese; Chinoiserie is, in many ways, a somewhat schizophrenic stye.

For some time it was generally considered that filigree work [myself included], in the context of China, was confined to the Qing Dynasty; this is not so. There are some fine examples of silver gilt and gold filigree items from the Ming Dynasty and much of it is clearly of a more masterly and robust workmanship than the items one can find in the 18th century in China. The Ming also made great use of the filigree technique in gold hair ornamentation [above], a style that re-emerged during Qianlong’s reign [immediately below] and much adored by the later Qing Empress Dowager Cixi as well as her penchant for extravagantly long filigree finger nail covers [below].

The use of silver gilt and gold wire-work is understood to have entered the repertoire of Chinese silversmiths and goldsmiths during the Yuan Dynasty [1271–1368 CE], the dynasty begun by Kublai Khan. This is now evident from the vast cache of burial wares found in tombs of Imperial families, their relatives and concubines. The fact the tombs are almost all in the Beijing area, the discovered tomb wares were all belonging to Imperial families and members of the nobility indicates strongly the items were probably made in the Imperial workshops or in workshops closely allied to them.

Some bronze items that date from the Warring States Period [475-221 BCE] have silver and gold wire-work applied or inlaid. This strongly indicates knowledge of the method of wire-working being introduced to China from elsewhere and given the date span this is likely to only have come from the Middle East or from Persia, in particular Babylon/Mesopotamia. The items found during the Ming Dynasty are often studded with gem stones and precious jewels, indicating a significant increase of sophistication of the art of wire-working by Chinese artisans. All these techniques strongly demonstrate that such items incorporating them had a strong link to the fashion of the time among the upper strata of Chinese society; fashion almost always influenced gold and silverwares and not vice versa.

What is probably even more significant is the appearance of such items in parallel to the development of Beijing as the Ming capital, instigated by the Yongle Emperor [1402-1424 CE]. Making Beijing the capital also included establishing it as the political centre of China as well as the centre for the development of culture and economics and by default, sophistication.

Soon after marrying, the relationship between Catherine and her daughter-in-law soured; she kept the couple as far away from politics at the court at Paul’s private estates at Gatchina, while Catherine could devoutly follow her own aspirations for ever more power.

Paul and Maria Feodorovna did eventually succeed to the throne in 1796 upon Catherine’s death from a stroke, he becoming Emperor and Autocrat Paul I of all the Russias.

The tea wares, as yet, still probably remained unused; tea drinking at the Russian court in the late 18th century would not have involved the use of Chinese cups. Russia was, however, dependent on tea coming from China, the 1727 Treaty of Kyakhta between Russia and China greatly increased the number of tea-bearing camel caravans being traded at the border and by Catherine’s death, in excess of 3 million pounds [1.36 million kg] of tea was being imported annually from China. It was highly likely a camel caravan brought the tea wares to Russia, or at least to the Sino-Russian border post at Maimenchan/Kyakhta.

Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna of Russia was betrothed to William, Prince of Orange in 1815 during a visit he paid to St Petersburg. 1 million roubles was settled as being the dowry, by her mother, now widowed. The wedding took place on 21 February 1816 at the Chapel of the Winter Palace at St Petersburg according to the Russian Orthodox tradition. Part of the betrothal agreement was categorical that their children would be raised as Protestants, while Anna Paulovna was allowed to remain Russian Orthodox. Their marriage was celebrated by Alexander Pushkin by his composing a poem entitled “To the Prince of Orange” – said to have been his first fee-paying oeuvre and possibly the beginning of his life-long passion for the colour orange. Anna assumed the title Her Imperial and Royal Highness The Princess of Orange.

In 1817, the couple returned to the Netherlands, where Anna Paulovna found a far more egalitarian society than St Petersburg, which was never to be to her liking. It is more than reasonable to assume that it was then the Chinese tea wares found their way to the Dutch court. When William became king, Anna became Queen Consort of the Netherlands, Grand Duchess Consort of Luxembourg, Duchess Consort of Limburg. The royal house was hence known as the House of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. It has been said of Anna Paulovna that she remained a Russian Grand Duchess more than she ever became Queen of the Netherlands!

The French and the Dutch preceded the English’ mania for tea-drinking. The Dutch tended to have some thee (a French word pronounced “tay”, even though they began their history of tea drinking using the Cantonese word cha). Orange Pekoe tea, a high grade tea, originated with the Dutch. It is said that on introduction to the House of Orange, they called it “pecco” – the word   supposedly derived from the Amoy (Xiamen) dialect word for a tea in China known as pe-ho or pih-haou [“white down’, 白毫]. Thus the name “Orange Pekoe,”  came into being in Europe, giving it an allusion of being a “royal” tea.

The tea wares left the royal court in 2011, having been sold at Sotheby’s for €204,750; the entire sale realised almost €7 million, the proceeds being given to charity on the stipulation of Her Majesty the Queen and Their Royal Highnesses Princess Irene, Princess Magriet and Princess Christina.

This, in my opinion, is the most logical deduction for a complete provenance of this important collection of Chinese silver tea wares.

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Adrien von Ferscht is one of the only academics actively working on research of Chinese export silver of the Qing dynasty; research that is carried out within the context of the 2200-year history of Chinese silver-making. He is an Academic Committee Member of the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture at Beijing Normal University and is a Lead Researcher at Tsinghua University, Beijing.  His Definitive Collectors’ Guide for Chinese Export Silver is widely used by auction houses and dealers around the world. His academic home base is Glasgow.

This article is written expressing a personal understanding and opinion formed through a focused forensic search of relevant historic facts related to the people involved in the historic timeline of this particular set of silver and a more deeper understanding of Qing Dynasty silver in terms of style and manufacturing based on ongoing research of the author, now in its 8th year.

Images courtesy of: Sotheby’s, Amsterdam; Sotheby’s, Hong Kong; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Dreweatts & Bloomsbury, UK; The Royal Archives of the Royal House of the Netherlands and the House of Orange-Nassau Historic Collections Trust, Den Haag, The Netherlands; The Art Museum of the Chinese University, Hong Kong

Special thanks to Dr Chao Huang, Sun Yat Sen University, Guangzhou; Esther Aardewerk, TEFAF/A. Aardewerk Antiquair Juwelier, Den Haag, The Netherlands

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DEFINITELY NOT A BAT OUT OF HELL!    西蝠非福，中蝠亦福 

The auspicious attachment to the bat in China highlights how different two cultures can be. In the West, the bat has almost always had sinister overtones. In China, however, it was far different.

There is an aura that has evolved around the Chinese Export Silver [Qing Dynasty Silver] repertoire that is riddled with folk tales that have, over the years, stuck and somehow have become fact. They are almost too many to mention, and to do so would make it seem as if I was trying to rewrite the history that surrounds an entire category of silver. But some tales do need either rewriting or at least re-adjusted and one such surrounds the purpose of a box that appears with reasonable regularity.

The highly stylised peach and bat-form box in itself has very definite feminine connotations within the world of Chinese symbolism As a decorative motif, the bat is symbolic of blessings and its being combined with a peach is one of the most frequently used decorative compounds in Chinese art; as with all such compounds, it can have complex allegorical and auspicious meanings.

The Chinese word for bat is fú [蝠]; the Chinese word for happiness is fú [福]. Although they have different characters in Chinese, they sound the same and as such are homonyms; they are also a rebus – a pictorial pun of two nouns, sounding alike yet able to convey different meanings.

The bat and peach combined motif is almost always showing the bat with spread wings. In this manifestation, the bat is known as fu i [附翼] or ‘all-embracing wings’ and it became particularly favoured by the Qing Dynasty.

The peach, tao [桃], also one of the most used decorative motifs in the Chinese art repertoire, is a symbol of longevity; it is also believed to have grown in the Queen Mother of the West’s, Xiwangmu [西王母], own private orchard. 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.As a symbol of longevity, it ranks beside the much-revered God of Longevity, Shulao [寿老]

The silver box [above left] is in the traditional form of the bat and peach combination. This particular box is by Wen Hua of Beijing; probably the most prolific “creator” of these boxes which may indicate they were particularly popular with ladies who frequented the Imperial court; a fashion accessory of the time, if you will. Occasionally the boxes appear internally fitted out with two or three sections; some even have a mirror fitted into the lid interior.

This auspicious attachment to the bat in China highlights how different two cultures can be. In the West, the bat has almost always had sinister overtones. In China, however, it was far different. According to Fan Zhang, “this association of bats with auspiciousness is related to the poetic idea of the sudden arrival of good fortune – like a bat suddenly flying across your field of vision at dusk.” “It is something to look for and something to look forward to.” A bat’s habit of hanging upside down and ability to remain motionless also led to it becoming a symbol of longevity. In Chinese culture, bats are perceived as having an other-worldliness, but in a good way.

While Chinese silver objects, as with Chinese decorative objects of other media, are virtually always carriers of allegory, these boxes are somewhat in a league of their own; they could almost be regarded as a form of amulet, willing good wishes to the owner through allegorical meaning and symbolism.

The same Wen Hua box carries a frieze border, itself edged either side with a meander border [left and right] that is a classic of the Chinese stock of motifs and visual imagery that also invokes longevity – it has no connection with the Western concept of the “Greek key pattern”. The reversed bat-form hinge does not escape being the bearer of a message; a bat shown upside  indicates that good fortune has arrived, since the Chinese phrase for “upside down” sounds similar to the characters for the word “arrived” – the character dao [倒] for “upside-down” and the character dao [到] meaning “to have arrived” are both pronounced ‘dao’ in almost identical fashion. The use of the homophone is much prevalent within Chinese culture

The peonies in the alternating middle frieze on the side of the box can almost mean longevity when taken in the context of the tree peony mudan [牡丹]. But the peony can also have the name fuguihua [富贵花], meaning “flower of wealth and honour”. The peony can also embody female beauty and lushness.

The peach is one of the “three abundances”, sanduo [三多], the other two being the pomegranate and the citron. Singularly, the peach represents longevity. The combination motif of the bat with the peach is conveying the main message of fushou shuangquan [福寿双全]“may you possess blessings and longevity”, in itself interesting because in the world of Chinese phrasal etiquette, this would normally be reserved for a more elderly person, usually a relative, at the new year.

The peach and bat combination was also used in Chinese porcelain decoration, as can be seen in the lidded blue and white porcelain tea bowl [circa 1662-1772].

The misconception surrounding the meaning or use of these silver boxes appears to have evolved entirely in the West [most probably North America] and probably as late as the latter part of the 20th century. Firstly, these boxes have become invariably referred to as being ‘Qingming boxes’; Qingming Jie [清明节] occurs on the 15th day after the spring equinox and is also known as ‘Tomb Sweeping Day’ [扫坟节]. It is a day spent visiting and tidying ancestors’ graves and involves various ceremonial rituals, including the offering of foods and the burning of incense sticks shāoxiāng [烧香] . Lilies and chrysanthemums are traditionally laid upon graves, while some people also burn money zhǐqián [纸钱] as symbolic offerings to the deceased. Qīngtuán [青团] or sweet green sticky rice balls are traditionally offered and eaten as well as a peach blossom porridge, crispy cakes sāzi [撒子], ‘qingming snails’ and eggs.

As with many things Chinese, it is further complicated by the day also being known as Tàqīng [踏青], meaning literally ‘spring outing’, when it is traditional to fly kites, often with coloured lanterns attached. Taqing celebrates the coming of spring and the superstition that has evolved that by letting the kite fly away will ward off disease and bring good luck.

Some people have come to believe that the decoration of these silver boxes show a moth, not a bat;  moths are believed to be the souls of deceased people who return during Qingming to visit their dearly departed. This is also a belief that has become confused over the years with the unique Huashu text or Book of Transformations that combines Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian alchemical and metaphysical thought, written in the 10th century Tang Dynasty.

However, there is no evidence whatsoever that these boxes have any plausible connection with qingming ceremonial or tradition. Whatever legends have become attached to them are purely folk legend that has probably occurred due to a confusion over the bat and peach symbolism.

The box, [left], also carries the mark of Wen Hua of Beijing; it is also decorated with a similar stylised bat and peach combination motif [below].

This particular box has been fitted with a mirror in the interior of the lid and the main box is sectioned into three compartments. This most probably indicates it was intended as some sort of cosmetic box.

Little is known about Wen Hua other than it was located in Beijing and was more than likely a small artisan workshop that also dealt directly with clients.  No address is known but the fact that small items in the neo-classical English style are known to exist [right] that also carry the mark may indicate it was located in the old diplomatic area established in 1861 known as the Legation Quarter, or Dong Jiaomin Xiang [東交民巷]. It existed adjacent to the Forbidden

City, immediately east of  Tiananmen Square. It is known that members of the Imperial court, including princes, literati and nobles patronised the few retail and artisanal establishments there as well as the several hotels, such as Hôtel des Wagons Lits. Towards the latter part of the Qing Dynasty, the Peking to Mukden Railway was established next to the Legation Quarter.

The 1860 Convention of Peking obliged the Chinese to assist the British to acquire suitable permanent premises in Peking for a diplomatic mission. The newly appointed British Minister, Frederick Bruce, negotiated the lease of a 5-acre compound housing the palace of the Duke of Liang.  The palace itself,  Liangongfu, which became the minister’s residence, was north from the gateway: a traditional Chinese building with a series of courts divided by handsome timber open pavilion structures roofed with green glazed tiles. It was all on one single floor, and was reconfigured as far as was practicable for its use as a diplomatic entertaining role by enclosing some open pavilions and connecting them with corridors in order to form a large single dwelling around a central courtyard. The interiors of the state apartment were handsome with the ceilings highly decorated ‘with gold dragons within circles on a blue ground, which again are in the centre of small squares of green, separated by intersecting bars in relief of green and gold’.

While silver is probably the medium of choice for Chinese bat and peach-form boxes, it is by far not the exclusive material of choice. Perhaps the most  extraordinary in so many ways appeared three years ago at auction in Hong Kong; a hand-carved rock crystal box from the Qing Dynasty Qianlong period [1735-1796]. Neither is the rebus combination confined to taking the physical stylised form; The box [below] 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.

While simply rectangular in form, this highly decorated box was made by the Tientsin [Tianjin] silversmith, Qing Yun in the mid-19th century. It is reasonable to assume this was a bespoke creation and while it, as with the more usual stylised form such boxes tended to take, it presents as a virtual hand grenade of allegorical meaning. It is also plain to see that this silversmith has clearly taken great delight in lavishing many hours of work to create this tiny masterpiece.

[Right] “Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice” painted by  John Singer Sargent in 1888; a woman with an obvious zest for life and a highly sophisticated sense of style she wished to share with an entire nation. Having lost her only son to pneumonia at less than two years old, she travelled extensively which, in 1883-4, too her to China. It was then the box came into Isabella’s possession.  Other acquisitions that now make up the extraordinary collection at the Gardner Museum include treasures by Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Isabella Stewart Gardner suffered a stroke in 1919 but continued to receive guests in her museum for the next five years. She died in 1924, leaving a museum “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s then newly acquired box was taken back to Boston in the United States where she lived. As such, it was a  reluctant export, so to speak, but the vast majority of its “cousins” were undoubtedly made for or bought by Chinese individuals living in China. Again, perhaps,  giving weight to the now more accurate perception that while some of the silver created in China during the Qing Dynasty was indisputably made specifically for the export This auspicious attachment to the bat in China highlights how different two cultures can be. In the West, the bat has almost always had sinister overtones. In China, however, it was far different; the vast majority of it was not.

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Bonsai [kanji 盆栽] has become known across the Western world as well as much of Asia, yet as an English noun it has only existed as a dictionary word since 1950 describing, in the main, the rather enigmatic world of individual miniature trees that have been painstakingly clipped and trained; it has morphed into being more of a generic term in the West. As a Japanese art form, it developed during the 14th century from what was then known as ha chi noki  [鉢の木; “the potted trees”], the art of propagating miniature trees in deep pots. It moved from being a singularly esoteric practice to being a more mainstream past-time in the 19th century.

Few people realise that Japan had imported the concept from China, mainly through Japanese Imperial embassy representatives and Buddhist students who visited China. Pénjǐng [盆景], the ancient Chinese art form meaning literally “tray scenery”, also known as pénzāi [盆栽], “tray plant”, began to slowly develop back in China in the Han Dynasty [206 BCE – 220 CE] and, as with many Chinese decorative art forms, it was inextricably linked to trade with the outside world – or to be more exact, the outside world’s trade with China; the Han dynasty was an age of economic prosperity carried over from the previous Zhou Dynasty. Foreign merchants brought herbal aromatics into China, never before seen there. This, in turn,  engendered the creation of incense burners specially designed for these new fragrant herbs that took the form of a short-stemmed cup [boshan lu] with a perforated lid more often than not in the form of a stylised sacred mountain or island [Fig. 1]. For practical purposes, a shallow lipped dish [pén] was placed under the stem of the burner to catch stray embers or ash; the pén, as a Chinese item, finds its roots in China even further back in the Shang Dynasty [1600-1046 BCE], manifesting firstly in pottery and later in bronze and used originally for food or as water vessels [Fig. 2 & 3]. This then morphed into being a more ceremonial item in bronze during the Zhou Dynasty [circa 1046 BCE–256 BCE].

The stylisation of the mountain form in early censer objects is, in many respects, similar to the stylised representation of mountains in shān shuǐ traditionalChinese painting; a term that translates best as meaning “mountain water”, but in fact is the nearest Chinese equivalent to the Western concept of landscape painting as the Chinese saw it. This style set out to depict natural landscapes or scenery using pen and inks. The style developed in the Sui and Tang Dynasties [circa 550-600 CE], originally introduced by the artist Zhan Ziqian. His only known existing painting is entitled “Strolling About in Spring” [Fig.4]. As a definitive style, it aimed to create a stylised visual allegory of that mystic dichotomy that characterises Daoist cosmology, the mountains representing the solid reality of the Earth, exemplified by the principle of yang and the waters invoking the imperceptible essence of yin.

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Decorative items made of mixed metals by Chinese artisans who were otherwise known for their work in silver and gold existed throughout the many centuries of China’s silver-making history, but they were rarely noticeable during the 255-year Qing dynasty silver repertoire. That said, 19th and early 20th century Chinese silversmiths certainly had a penchant for the dramatic and while textures and various techniques can accentuate such an effect, the use of copper and silver together have the capacity to embolden an otherwise potentially mundane item. This is particularly so when one considers that much of the 19th century Chinese silver lexicon consisted of traditional Chinese motifs that were imposed upon otherwise European forms. The fact that to Chinese eyes these motifs, particularly combinations of them, had profound allegorical meaning; 19th century Chinese silver, therefore, can be said to have been constantly pushing the boundaries of previously established norms.

This is an extremely interesting and rare item [Fig.1]; a late 19th century [possibly very early 20th century] bowl that is essentially made of copper with applied silver decorative elements and supported on a silver base. The bowl was made by a Shanghai-based artisan workshop by the name of Hou Xiang 厚祥 for the then Hong Kong-based retail silversmith Wang Hing & Company. By the end of the 19th century, it was not particularly unusual for retail silversmiths to use artisans from other cities, especially where specialised skills were required. While some researchers of Qing dynasty silver [aka Chinese export silver] over the past sixty years have alluded to Wang Hing having had a Shanghai store, no documentary proof has ever surfaced to support this and my own research carried out with descendants of the original owners, the Cantonese Lo family, maintain they have no knowledge of a Shanghai branch of the firm ever existing.

This is only the second time I have encountered such a mixed metal object in the context of the Qing dynasty silver repertoire; the other item was made by the Canton-based [Guangzhou] artisan workshop Chang Lin 昌林, possibly better known as the Cantonese name “Cheong Lam”, the transliterated name it used for its retail operation [Fig.2; 3 & 4].

This is a fairly large bowl, measuring 24cm in diameter and weighing a hefty 1243gm. 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 a visually 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 a stroke of genius and irony. The bowl interior is parcel gilded, suggesting it was designed to be used for food or a drinkable liquid, quite possibly soup. The relatively heavy hammer-work finish is unusual for Chinese export silver; it would be more usual to see a finely planished finish, but then this is intended to be an under-water scene. As one moves around the bowl, we discover the crab is in a water-scape of pond weeds, 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 planished flared foot. Pondweed [zao 藻] is one of the Twelve Imperial Symbols [shier zhangwen 十二章紋] representing the element of water and is indicative of harmony and light – the number twelve is the number of Heaven, according to The Book of Rights [li ji 禮記] – the Emperor was the Son of Heaven. Continuing further around the bowl on one’s journey through this underworld fantasy, one comes across another crustacean in the form of a large conch shell nestling among a variant of seaweed which has brass underneath the silver meshwork that represents the texture of the outer shell.

One mystery remains, possibly; 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]? As a classic Cantonese dish, it often appears as a golden apparition in a bowl – possibly the reason why the interior of the bowl has been parcel gilded. In modern-day China, the name for this crab has also become a modern colloquial term for a loser on the financial or property markets because when the crab is cooked its claws are tied up rendering it useless – no connection with this bowl, however! As a species, this 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. It is also perceived as a symbol of Buddha’s deep and resonant voice and was physically used to call worshippers to prayer, using it as an ancient musical instrument awakening believers from their slumber of ignorance. In ancient times, conch shells were considered of high value and were used as currency, particularly white shells. The crab is representative of harmony in Chinese tradition.

Returning to the Hou Xiang bowl [Fig.4 + 5], it is made of thick gauge copper and is decorated with applied motifs made of silver of the four plant species that traditionally represent the four seasons;  winter: prunus 梅花 meihua; Spring: orchid 蘭花/兰花 lanhua; Summer: bamboo 竹 zhu; Autumn: chrysanthemum 菊花 juhua. The bowl is supported on three feet fashioned as orchid foliage and buds. Centrally placed above each foot is a reticulated silver medallion, each being a symbol for an auspicious good wish.

Both bowls are indicative of the vast majority of Qing silver objects inasmuch as they are both virtual hand grenades full of allegorical meaning when seen through Chinese eyes, while being quirky object for Western eyes. The bowls were almost certainly never made to venture outside of China; neither giving any substance to the use of the term “Chinese export silver”. 

REFERENCES:

1   Wang Hing & Company began life in Canton and only opened in Hong Kong towards the end of the 19th century

2   Hyytiäinen, T. [2008]. The eight auspicious symbols. In . E. M-R. S. . . E. T. H. (Ed.), Tibet: a culture in transition (pp. 194-199). [Tampere Museums’ publications]. Tampere: Vapriikki in conjunction with University of Helsinki

3   Encyclopedia of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives, C.A.S. Williams. New York: The Julian Press (1960). p. 190

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to Dr Chao Huang, Dept. of History, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China for his unequivocal support

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The Big Leap Forward

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In the past year there has been a noticeable increase in interest in Chinese silver miniature items from both the late Qing dynasty and the Republic era. Quite coincidentally this has been a period where my own research has focussed on collating and recording these items on the fast-growing image database that is part and parcel of that research; so far well over 60,000 items of Chinese silver have been collated and filed.

What doesn’t appear to have been part of this growing interest of collectors is an understanding of the actual artisan workshops that were responsible for producing this niche area of decorative Chinese silver. With over 50 workshops now recorded along example of their work, it is not only clear that the vast majority of these are as intricate in terms of the art of silver-making, but certain workshops shine out as particularly exemplary in items they manufactured.

Traditionally, Chinese silver collectors have tended to be far more aware of the retail silversmiths than the manufacturing workshops, in fact is would be fair to say the overwhelming majority of collectors are oblivious to the identity of the artisan responsible for actually creating Chinese silver wares. The identification and classification of in excess of fifty such workshops producing miniature items is in itself a testament to the fact that Chinese silver miniatures are perhaps not such a “niche” category than previously thought.

The reticulated high-back long bench [Fig.1] carries the mark of the Shanghai workshop of LUO QING 羅葝; this particular example was made for the Shanghai retailer HUNG CHONG. Miniature silver furniture items were not exactly rare, but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a bench. As for the Luo Qing workshop, so far it seems to have specialised in articulated novelty cruet items [Fig.2] that were made for the Shanghai retailers Tuck Chang and Hung Chong.

Whereas 19th and 20th century Chinese silver so often opens a window into Chinese culture through the use of traditional allegorical decorative motifs, miniature silver items provide an interesting insight into daily life in China at the time; rarely one finds an item of Chinese silver that is simply just whimsical.

Of the same period o as the long bench, one finds a reticulated bamboo motif arm chair [Fig.3] made by the Hong Kong workshop of KUAN JI 記寬, a woven rattan high-back chair [Fig.4] by RUN JI 潤記 of Canton for the retailer WANG HING and a miniature armchair with bat and peach motif back by LIN 林 [Fig.5] of Canton.

As with most items of Chinese silver, a discerning eye is equally required when looking at these miniatures. It is an unfortunate fact that e-commerce sites hosting the selling of antique silver are becoming increasingly populated by “Chinese silver” items that are almost literally hot off the press of the factory production line and these items are even finding their way into mainstream auction house sales; particularly so since COVID restrictions began. The bottom line is that all bona fide Chinese silver miniatures are well-made and often quite detailed and the unrelated pastiche “newborns” are invariably not, even though some of the latter carry some form of “silver mark” which is almost certainly equally as bogus as the very item that carries it. That said, careful and well-chosen collecting of this category of decorative Chinese silver can be highly satisfying; it is certainly a category that is rising, in terms of values.

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The SHING WO [SHENG HE] 和勝 artisan silver workshop in Canton was probably the most masterful in creating detailed miniature items of silver; a much-overlooked area of late Qing and Republic era Chinese silver-making.

What the West would probably call a “junk boat” finds its roots back in the Han dynasty; the Qing dynasty equivalent was not far removed from its Sung dynasty forebears that were in effect a Chinese equivalent of Western clipper.

The detailing of this miniature gunboat 戎克船 Rong ke chuan is so acute that it brings to life how life on these boats must have been back in the day.

The miniature was made for the Canton and Hong Kong retailer Wang Hing, it is grossly unfair that the Shing Wo workshop hardly ever receives credit. 

These miniatures were particularly popular from the late 19th century through to the late 1930s as the actual boats were a regular part of the Hong Kong bay area everyday scenery and the stretch of the Pearl River [珠江 Zhu Jiang] estuary, also known as the Boca Tigris [虎門 Hu men – lit.”tiger’s gate”] leading up to Guangzhou [Canton]. This particular example is in remarkably good condition.

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The Hong Kong retail silversmith WAI KEE 惠記 [in Mandarin: HUI JI] is one of the few retailers that truly spans three centuries; founded in 1885, the firm is still operating in almost the same location by Pedder Street with the same specialities of pearls, jewellery and what has become known as Chinese export silver wares. As opposed to other similar firms operating today in Hong Kong that lay claim to longevities in trading, Wai Kee is the oldest retail jeweller and silversmith in Hong Kong.

In 1941, the Wai Kee store [Fig.1] can be seen on the prominent corner of Pedder Street and Queen’s Road under the Hong Kong Hotel which stood there in various guises from 1868-1952;

the original building with open verandahs [Fig.2] was certainly the most evocative and luxurious in that area at the time – its telegraphic address was “KREMLIN”. The Kuhn & Komor store, [Fig.3] in circa 1920, was also under the hotel which was equally famous for its silver wares but unlike Wai Kee, did not run its own silver-making workshops.

The hotel may be long-gone and the merchandise of the Wai Kee store today may be more commercial and generic than the items it sold back in the day, but in my daily research quest to build the ultimate database of Chinese silver wares of the Qing dynasty and the Republic era I encountered a nice surprise; some items carrying the Wai Kee silver mark made for the Royal Hong Kong Police [RHKP]. Perhaps, given current news coming out of Hong Kong these days, this sparked a degree of nostalgia for its Crown Colony days.

A pair of Wai Kee sterling silver cufflinks and tie clip [Fig 4 collectively] with cast silver and enamel emblems of the RHKP came as an initial surprise, but on reflection it would have been totally natural to have wearable insignia made by a local Hong Kong firm; it’s certainly the first time I have encountered what is now RHKP memorabilia, albeit Wai Kee made a speciality of manufacturing small dishes with inset old coins as well as items of silver for the many Hong Kong clubs that abounded in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century.

References:

Fig.1: University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Library Digital Collections: Harrison Forman Collection; gwulo.com

Fig.2&3: gwulo.com

Fig.4: chinese-export-silver.com  QING DYNASTY SILVER IMAGE ARCHIVE 

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CHINESE EXPORT SILVER: Cicada Season!

With billions of cicadas about to plague America, to the Chinese they have traditionally been a symbol of immortality and longevity.

Chinese gentry once decorated their hats with a jade cicada, 蝉 chan, in the belief they would be considered a man of principle; the fact the cicada climbs to the top of trees and  drinks the morning dew, it also symbolises unpretentiousness  – perhaps a conflict of interests there!

In more modern times, the cicada has perhaps acquired a more meaningful connotation. Because it is intent on reaching the top of a tree, when it finally arrives there it makes that familiar loud noise, yiming jingren 鳴驚人, which means “ to amaze the world with a single brilliant feat” – what many a Chinese person might aspire to.

So it made me smile today when details of this tankard from the Canton retail firm of Lee Ching 利昇 arrived in my inbox on cue, as it were. Made in the last quarter of the 19th century, it is double skinned in order to mask the reverse side of the repoussé work of the lavish exterior decoration

The combination of a cicada and bamboo has a very strong allegorical meaning; bamboo, zhu 竹, represents strength of character, endurance and uprightness. Its hollow stems conveys the message of humility and pureness of heart. A dense bamboo grove, as this tankard depicts, also may convey the meaning of filial piety – closeness to parents.  

Bamboo may also be seen as a homophone; zhu 竹 and the Chinese word zhu 祝,allows an image of bamboo to convey the meaning “wish” or “congratulate”. Add to the mix the cicada, the message becomes all the more stronger – possibly congratulations on being promoted or achieving excellent examination results.

I remain sceptical whether this will alter most Americans’ perception of the cicada, though, as the much-forecast plague hits!

IMAGES:

PANDOLFINI CASA D’ASTE, Florence, Milan, Rome

REFERENCES:

Chinese Art – A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery; Patricia Bjaaland Welch, 2008

Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art; Terese Tse Bartholomew, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2006

Smithsonian, National Museum of Asian Art – https://asia.si.edu/cicadas/#:~:text=Since%20ancient%20times%2C%20the%20cicada,to%20its%20fascinating%20life%20cycle.&text=In%20the%20Han%20dynasty%2C%20jade,hope%20for%20rebirth%20and%20immortality.

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