Page 116 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands” 101

Figure 7.2 Inscription on the base of the Hope Grant Ewer Reading: 十兩, 成,
(Weight: 60 liang [taels], 80 Percent [purity], 2nd Year of the Xianfeng Reign
[1852]). By kind permission of the National Museums Scotland.

ewers featured a fully enclosed pouring spout projecting from the body of the
vessel, rather than the open duck-bill spout at the top of the neck found in Middle
9
Eastern ewers of several centuries earlier. One scholar has suggested that body-
spouted ewers, which were not a feature of ewers found in Iraq or Iran during early
Islamic times, may have originated in the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171) of North
Africa. 10
Returning to the Hope Grant Ewer, comparison between it and surviving Ming
and Qing metalwork ewers demonstrates a range of similar features, most notably
in a significant Qing example in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, which
is almost identical. 11 The Palace Museum ewer is almost indistinguishable from the
Hope Grant Ewer in every major feature of design, form, and material with the most
significant difference being the disparity in the weight of the two ewers, with the
Hope Grant Ewer weighting in at 60 liang (approx. 2,267 grams) while the Palace
Museum ewer is less than half as heavy at 29 liang and 9 qian (approx. 1,115 grams).
Other examples survive from the former collection of the Swedish industrialist
Dr Johan Carl Kempe (1884–1967). 12 A beaten silver ewer of Ming date formerly
in the Kempe Collection is analogous in form, dimension, and decoration to the Hope
Grant Ewer suggesting an extraordinarily high degree of both consistency and
continuity in the design of artifacts produced by the Palace workshops across a number
of centuries. Few examples of gold artifacts from the Ming imperial court survive in
either of the Palace Museum collections in Beijing or Taipei, and only a small number