清十八世紀 玊髓隨形刻蘇詢聯句鼻煙壺 「香清」「石閏」印 《玩雅軒》款

「水向石邊流出冷風從花裏過來香」字

Gerry P. Mack 收藏
Gary Mack 收藏
Robert Kleiner，倫敦，2000年

The overall condition is very good, apart from a tiny dent to the silver outer lip. The stone has some natural flaws, and the actual colour is slightly more greyish than the catalogue illustration.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The Wanya xuan (‘Studio of Refined Amusement’) may have been a princely studio of the first half of the eighteenth century. It only appears otherwise on a fairly broad series of mostly plain glass snuff bottles (see Treasury 5, 編號 751-753, where others are cited).

The couplet on the bottle is both obscure and famous.

水向石邊流出冷，風從花裏過來香 
The stream flows out near the stones, cold;
The breeze blows hither amid the blossoms, fragrant.

The couplet is obscure because its authorship is unknown. It may be an independent couplet, not part of a poem; in the Yinjing xi 蟫精雋by the fifteenth-century scholar Xu Boling 徐伯齡, it is mentioned as coming from an ‘ancient poem’ (gushi 古詩), but Xu presents it as an example of lines that are extraordinary even though the poem from which they putatively come does not exist. (In Xu’s version, li 裏, ‘amid’, is di 底, ‘beneath’, but we assign no significance to the variant.) Indeed, any poems found in which these two lines are incorporated are twentieth-century compositions; no pre-modern source treats them as anything more than a freestanding couplet.

Some sources ascribe the couplet to Su Xun 蘇詢 (1006 – 1066; the father of Su Shi), but the anecdote in which it figures is probably apocryphal. More credible is the Nan Han shu 南漢書, a history of a tenth-century kingdom centred on modern Guangzhou, by Liang Tingnan 梁廷柟 (1796 – 1861), which states that this couplet was inscribed on a stone table in the study of Hu Binwang 胡賓王 (jinshi of 999 or 1000); presumably, Liang had some kind of documentary source for this detail.

The couplet was also inscribed in the hand of the Qianlong emperor on the Yunqi Temple 雲棲寺 on Five-Cloud Mountain southwest of Hangzhou’s West Lake. This fact may account for its coming to the attention of the carver or designer of this bottle.

The first line of the couplet is famous because it is used in a riddle in Dream of the Red Chamber: the clue is ‘the name of an ancient’, and the prompt is ‘The stream flows out near the stones, cold’. The answer to the riddle is Shan Tao 山濤, a third-century figure; the characters that spell out his name mean ‘mountain breakers’. However, the second line is not mentioned in the novel, so the carver of this bottle took his inscription from some other source.