Response and Responsibility

11 identifiable phase of faking may have been fueled by a desire to fool foreign collectors, but fakers have always been opportunists, and it would have occurred to them to try to fool their own native collectors as well. From the Daoguang period onward, as Western collectors from as far afield as America bought bottles as collectors ’ items, Chinese fakers began to produce a range of “ early ” wares, some of which could not have existed at the time, such as ceramics with Kangxi and Yongzheng reign marks. No genuine Kangxi porcelain snuff bottle has yet come to light, and genuine Yongzheng-marked porcelain snuff bottles are almost as rare as hen ’ s-teeth; there is one that has survived and can be identified and there are records of others in the Imperial archives. 1 After the opening up of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853 and an increase in the involvement of American collectors, Japanese dealers began to trade with the United States. Faced with a demand for snuff bottles from a new group of keen collectors, Japanese dealers soon found it profitable to augment the old snuff bottles they could acquire from China with locally made products. The result was a flood of collectors ’ bottles, produced to the extraordinary standards of artistry of Meiji craftsmen, ranging from outright fakes and pastiches to innovative types and styles, some even honestly signed by their Japanese makers. I believe that of this flood of wares, from Japan and late Qing and Republican China, some have been convincing enough to be accepted as genuine works, although we may never be able to identify all of them. Others may have been accepted as genuine but will be reassessed in the light of the vast amount of fresh information available to the modern researcher, unimaginable in Lilla Perry ’ s day. Today we have old auction catalogues, particularly from late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth- as brass from the first reign of the dynasty? I began to publish, followed by Bob Stevens, one of Lilla ’ s fellow Los Angeles collectors, and between us we uncovered a few more. We didn ’ t question them; indeed, I defended them with splendid sophistry and managed to find all sorts of convincing evidence that they were genuine. What we all had lost sight of, however, was that by the 1970s we were no longer dealing with a small group of rarities; there were at least thirty known bottles. Still we clung doggedly to our arguments; well, I certainly did. Intolerance of doubt is a constantly lurking danger for the researcher, and the moment connoisseurship shifts from open-minded exploration to defence of a fixed position, it is in trouble. Eventually, however, even the most stubborn defender must begin to tire in the face of overwhelming evidence. Today we can identify more than fifty examples from publications and other records, and that is after having discounted any possible duplication century America. 2 We also have an increasingly large number of recent publications, giving us a far wider range of bottles to consider. Perhaps most important of all, however, is access to information from the Imperial Archives in China which hold an extraordinary treasure-trove of reliable, if often frustratingly brief, information as to precisely what was being made for the court and when. All of this grants us a much clearer picture of the art form. Let us now look at the Shunzhi- bronze group of bottles bearing the signature of Zheng Rongzhang, long considered our earliest identifiable group of purpose-made snuff bottles ( fig. 1 ). When we first began to take a serious look at snuff bottles, in those heady, innocent days when Lilla Perry’s book was our bible, we knew of only a very small number of these bottles. 3 We knew snuff bottles were a purely Qing art form, so why should one or two not have survived in so enduring a substance Fig. 1. Group of Cheng Rongzhang bottles.