Page 36 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

silversmiths demanded a fraction of the price of a London or Birmingham silversmith yet
their quality of Canton workmanship was on a par with the very best in Britain.

British merchants in Canton were quick to realise this, so did the ever-wily sea captains
plying the China Trade routes and the controlling Hong merchants in Canton were
operating on exactly the same wavelength. This is the main reason why we are aware of
so much Chinese silver made in this period in the neo-classical “Georgian” style. It is this
combined dynamic that caused such an outpouring of pseudo-English silver from Canton
to Britain and to America’s Massachusetts Bay and not, as had been the general
perception of this phenomenon, some whimsical desire to create silver in the a potpourri of
classical Western styles.

There has also been a long-held school of thought that entrepreneurial sea captains
brought redundant Western silver to Canton to be ‘re-cycled’ into newer, more fashionable
pieces that were then re-exported back. It is highly doubtful this was the case. Not only
were the neo-classical pieces created in Canton generally of a far heavier gauge of silver
to any Western counterpart, the sheer logistics of reprocessing existing silver items makes
no sense whatsoever. Equally, the belief that silver examples were brought to Canton to
copy is hard to substantiate given this would have meant valuable silver items being away
from its owners for over a year at a time when they would have been at their height of
fashion and social desirability. The lifestyles of the privileged foreign merchants resident in
the ‘factories’ at Canton and, in particular, their entertaining, was legendary. An abundance

An early-mid 19th century tea and coffee set in the neo-classical style with the beginnings of Chinese influences

of the finest china, silverwares and cutlery would have been in everyday use at table and it
is more likely that these provided the templates for the skilled Canton silversmiths to copy
as well as provide ‘inspiration’ for some artistic licence.