AN INSCRIBED BRONZE 'DRAGON' SNUFF BOTTLE LATE QING DYNASTY / REPUBLICAN PERIOD

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 7, Hong Kong, 2009, no. 1620.

Minute nibbles to both the outer lip and outer footrim. A slightly larger indentation on the neck and damage on the body of the dragon, centrally just above the foot. Tarnishing to the surface.
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What remains to establish is when the Cheng Rongzhang 程榮章 bottles were made. The existence of one purchased in 1921 or 1922 in Beijing for the Ko Collection and another already in the Field Museum by 1923 suggests that they were made before the 1920s, so there is a reasonable terminal date for them. (It is unlikely that the Shunzhi Bronze Forger was working in the early 1920s and continued to produce his fakes after those two were recorded, although this cannot be ruled out.) As for their earliest date of production, there would have been little incentive to produce fakes prior to the time when collectors began to enter the marketplace, creating a demand for old bottles as works of art in their own right (regardless of to what extent they may also have used them). Because foreign collectors encouraged the production of fakes to a significant extent, onecan rule out any date earlier than the Daoguang period—which is when one first sees the regular use of fake reign marks on porcelain bottles. Otherwise, one has very little to go on in dating them between the Daoguang reign and the 1920s, although one possible clue lies in the number of claws on the dragons.

A faker producing bottles in the late Qing or Republican period would have been working primarily for an audience of foreign collectors. He would have known that his bottles were sold by local dealers to foreigners, and since they were fakes in any case, he probably would have ignored imperial protocols and used five-clawed dragons freely. Of course, any faker working in the Republican period would have felt no inhibitions whatsoever about imperial protocols, since they all went the way of the dynasty in 1911. What kind of dragon is on the Cheng Rongzhang bottles?. There are several others that are four-clawed beasts but could, by a fast-talking salesman, be represented as five-clawed, but the majority are four-clawed beasts. It may well be that the forger did these ambiguous examples in order to satisfy his dealers, who could present them to foreigners as five-clawed beasts, while giving himself deniability should any suspicious official haul him up for unauthorized production of a five-clawed imperial beast. This may indicate that he was working in or close to Beijing, where he had to be a bit more careful about flouting imperial protocol, and perhaps as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, before these protocols broke down to a great extent as the Qing dynasty waned.

By dispensing with Cheng 程 and zhang 章, the maker has reduced the reign mark to six characters, making it resemble one standard format for an imperial reign mark.