Response and Responsibility

12 in recording them. The figure is, in reality, probably closer to sixty ( fig. 2 ). In Perry ’ s day a handful of bottles from the 1640s, signed and dated, seemed perfectly reasonable. In our day, as many as sixty of them is less credible. Apart from the numbers involved, the regular appearance of five-clawed dragons on the group imply that they are Imperial, yet they are signed by an individual, and, conveniently, all precisely dated to a given year in the first decade of the earliest Qing Emperor to rule China. What is more, maybe sixty exist around the world, but there is not a single one in the Imperial Collection (virtually unknown in Lilla ’ s day but now reasonably fully published) or in the Imperial records. It is true that bronze is virtually indestructible in use as a snuff bottle, but when you consider the usual attrition of time over a period of nearly four hundred years, through household fires, the ravages of war, and even simple carelessness, how many must originally have been made for about sixty to survive today? If they were the earliest, possibly Imperial, snuff bottles, and so many had been made, we might expect some to have remained in the Imperial Collection and some response to them to appear in later Imperial records, but nothing has yet come to light. They are an anomaly. They also represent a credibility gap today which was not apparent in Lilla Perry ’ s day. They are a large group of bottles from the first decade of the Qing period, suggesting a much larger output, but there is no literary or physical evidence of snuff bottles or snuff taking until the 1680s, a quarter of a century later. When Yang Boda delivered his lecture to the Society in Beijing in 1996, he set out to establish that they were fakes. 4 Based on the assumption that snuff bottles use began with the court, he said that there were no records of bronze bottles produced there. He felt that the form was inconceivable because of the integral snuff dishes. He also found the style inconceivable for the period, making comparisons with other fields of art such as Imperial ceramics and textiles, although admittedly these can be misleading. He concluded that the bottles were fakes made after the introduction in 1956 of certain short-form characters, some of which appear on the bottles. He may be right about them being fakes, but not about when they were made. There has been a standard example of the group in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago since 1923. 5 According to the museum acquisition card (the bottle itself disappeared some time ago, presumed stolen, which now becomes a little ironic), it was presented to the Captain Marshall Field Expedition to China in 1923 by Peter J. Bahr, brother of a Shanghai dealer in Chinese antiquities, Abel W. Bahr. Apart from the Bahr example, there is a bottle from the Ko Collection with records indicating that it was bought in Beijing in either 1921 or 1922. Yang, however, could not have known about that example Fig. 4. Ye Bengqi. Fig. 3. Ko Collection example. Fig. 2. Group with five-clawed dragons and signature.