Page 14 - Bonhams Roy David's Collection Nov 2014 London

porcelain, could and indeed did find their way to the West.
Even in 1924, after he had left the Palace, Pu Yi learned ‘that
the [Household] Department had received 5,000,000 dollars
in that year from pawning gold, silver and antiques’. Stephen
Bushell adds a specific case: ‘Wine Pot …No other porcelain
rivals this. The piece figured is from the collection of Huang,
General of the Guards in Peking, who told me that he had
bought it for 200 ingots of silver in paper notes … from one
of the chief eunuchs of the palace.’ An earlier chief eunuch,
Liu Jin, who fell from favour in 1510, had had an extensive
mansion, two and a half million taels in gold and silver, two
suits of solid gold armour, twenty-five pounds of precious
stones, 3,000 gold rings and brooches, 500 gold plates and
over 4,000 gem-studded belts. The Dowager Empress Cixi’s
chief eunuch, Li Lien Ying, left a fortune of five million pounds worn it during her reign, during the siege of 1900, in her flight,
sterling at his death. Juan Chin-shou, the deputy chief eunuch
of Pu Yi’s entourage, ‘was so rich he could wear a different
fur gown every day in the winter, and although these gowns
included a number of different sables he never wore the same
one twice. The sea otter cloak that he wore on New Year’s
Day would have represented a lifetime’s expenditure for a petty
official’. One of the reasons why there are fakes in the Imperial Hooker of the Marine Corps, tells a wry tale about the Qing
Collection is that eunuchs replaced genuine articles with them.
3. Gifts by Emperors to members of their family,
foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, employees and
those deserving of recognition. In 1891, on a special
occasion, ’80 pieces of the finest quality, and 1,204 round
articles of the high class kind … 1,414, dishes, cups and
vases’ were sent to Peking to be given away as gifts on the
birthday of the Emperor Guangxu. Reginald Johnston notes,
more generally: ‘On the eve of each of the great festivals it was sterling. He was, in fact, notorious for his weakness, and
customary [for the Emperor] to send presents of money, for
which we gave formal thanks (hsei En) at the audiences in the
Palace of Cloudless Heaven. Other gifts, of porcelain, books,
pictures, jade and other things from the imperial collections,
were occasionally presented by the emperor in person,
merely as tokens of goodwill … the arrival of gift-bearing
messengers from the palace often caused a commotion in
the neighbourhood’. Doubtless some of these and similar gifts
were sold on and would have travelled West. John Ayers is of
the opinion that the ‘peachbloom’ wares, perhaps the rarest
and most outstanding produce of the Imperial kilns during
Kangxi’s reign, are likely to have been made as presents for
members of the court, though Julian Thompson has pointed
out that there are hundreds of them in the Imperial Collection
in Taipei. Cosmo Monkhouse stated that, ‘Many, if not most, of
the pieces of this colour [peachbloom] which have left China
formerly belonged to the hereditary princes of Yi, who are
descended from the emperor [Kangxi], and whose collections
have been broken up within recent years’. Monkhouse also
declares that graviata ware ‘was paid as a yearly tribute to
the Emperor at Peking, who consequently had a very large
collection of it, of which he made presents to European and
other visitors’, though this may be based only on hearsay.
During the early years of the Republic, high-level officials
apparently treated the Imperial collections as a source of gifts
of eminent persons. The American painter Katherine Carl
adds: ‘Every festival, every ceremony, and all anniversaries
are marked by presents, in the Palace. There is scarcely a
day that presents are not sent into the Palace, that some are
not sent out, and rarely a day when some presents are not
exchanged by those ‘Inside’ ’. When Sarah Pike Conger, wife
of the American Minister to China 1898-1905, left China for
her husband’s new posting in Mexico, Cixi gave her a blood
jade that ‘had been worn by some one of China’s rulers for
two thousand years, and the present Empress Dowager had
during her stay hundreds of miles from her palace home, and
during her return to her own Peking and Forbidden City, and it
protected her through all her dangers.’ Mrs Conger’s head boy,
Wang, exclaimed on seeing it: ‘That Blood Stone grand thing.
No Chinaman, much money, can’t get like that.’ Mary Hooker,
wife of a member of the American Legation, Lieutenant Richard
statesman Li Hung Chang:
[He] had secured a most advantageous treaty for his
Empress… At the end of the interview the Empress made a
sign to him to indicate that he would receive a personal gift
for his services, which would be given to him in the anteroom.
Li Hung Chang had always been a great collector of Chinese
ceramics, and his collections were promptly sold by him to
the highest bidder at Christie’s in London for many pounds
it was well known that he would sell anything he owned,
providing the amount offered was large enough … On leaving
the audience-chamber, his eyes sparkled when a large
cloth-of-gold, containing some heavy article, was handed to
him by a eunuch. He flew to his own palace, hardly able to
wait for his secretary Mr Pethick, who is one of the greatest
connoisseurs on ancient Chinese art, to arrive and examine this
new acquisition, which had come straight from the Empress-
Dowager’s treasure store. Some time was spent in careful
examination to determine the dynasty during which the treasure
was produced, but the date of this special paste was lost, with
its other technical classifications. After a long time, Mr Pethick
lifted it gingerly, placed it on a table, put himself in front of it,
drawing a wrap around his shoulders, and slowly, very slowly,
held his hands up to it, turning them in the attitude of warming
them at a fire. Chinese needs few words. Li understood, and
was heart-broken. This was a clever reproduction made in
Paris, and the secretary warming his hands before it meant it
was so fresh from the pottery furnace that he could still notice
the warmth. Naughty old Empress, fooling her most faithful of
servitors!