Page 138 - March 22 2022 Bonhams

A partial ‘Golden Gate International Exposition’ label to the base of We can say with certainty that the vase entered the US to be
the vase, together with a US Customs label for the 1939 Exhibition exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco,
confirm the exhibition information. Another label to the base from in 1939.
the Chinese Products & Co. Ltd. 中國國貿推銷場股份有限公司, is
numbered, No. (-5)?-10 and priced at $125.00 For a vase of identical shape with relief-molded lines at the shoulder
and two iron-red striding dragons to the sides, rather than the dragon
Wen-Han Wei, the grandfather of the present owner, was born in and phoenix of our example, but identically painted with a floral and
Tianjin in 1896 (fig. I and fig. II with his family). His father was a ‘farm- shou band at the shoulder and green and white enameled breaking
hand’. Despite these humble beginnings he graduated in 1921 from waves at the foot, see Porcelains with Cloisonné Enamel Decoration
the University of Nanjing. He traveled to the US where he enrolled and Famille Rose Decoration, The Complete Collection of Treasures
in the University of Chicago Law School. Ever resilient, he paid his of the Palace Museum, Hong Kong, 1999, p. 269, no. 238. It bears a
way through school by selling aluminum cookware door-to-door. Guangxu six-character mark in underglaze blue.
Here he met Irene Donar (the present owner’s Irish Grandmother)
and they married in 1927, the year he graduated from law school. He For two other examples see, Christie’s, London, 11 November 2015,
then opened a law practice in Shanghai. The heady travel schedule lot 833, the neck painted with ‘Eight Buddhist Emblems’, bajixiang,
and time apart, sadly led to divorce. She returned to the US., to rather than the twelve bats of our example; and another with an iron-
her hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, with all four children (including red mark, sold at Christie’s, London, 3 November 2020, lot 183.
the father of the present owner). Wen-Han Wei visited the family
but deemed a return for the children too dangerous, given that the For a vase of similar type painted with butterflies, and also bearing an
Japanese, sometime after September 1937, had already occupied iron-red Guangxu mark, see Imperial Porcelain of Late Qing from the
Shanghai. However, his business operations remained open as his Kwan Collection, Art Gallery, The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
house was located in the French Concession. Wen-Han Wei was one 1983, p. 133, pl. 140.
of the earliest maritime law specialists in China, a prolific writer and
lecturer. The Shanghai Maritime University calls him the “pioneer of
Chinese maritime law”.

We do not know when Wen-Han Wei purchased the vase, but the
present owners father told his children that this vase was one of
the Chinese artifacts that his father had purchased, eventually to be
given to his wife, Irene Donar.

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