Page 64 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

It is appropriate to repeat myself here by stating the most noticeable differences between
how China and the West approaches Chinese Export Silver has to be in how identification
is established. For over 50 years Western experts have almost exclusively focused on the
English silver marks, while any Chinese marks are largely ignored or simply referred to as
being “Chinese character marks”. For over 50 years, Western descriptions refer to the
English marks as being those of the “maker”. Almost without exception, the English mark
will refer to the name of the retail silversmith, in most cases not an actual name of a
person but a manufactured trading name intended to be auspicious rather than
informative.

The Chinese character mark will invariably be the mark of the actual artisan silversmith
and is frequently accompanied by a statement of silver purity. In the absence of any formal
assay system in China, such purity marks exist on the whim of the artisan or retail
silversmith. However, it is a whim formulated in their knowledge that raw silver was derived
from mainly melted psych ingots or silver trade dollars.

The Chinese mark is therefore the most relevant and because of this Chinese collectors
and dealers use it not only to identify a piece but also to judge its merit. The same
benchmark exists for other world silver categories - the fact an item might carry the mark
of Paul Storr, for example, tells us of its supreme quality, the fact it may also carry marks
for Garrard the London court retail jeweller and silversmith is simply a further endorsement
of quality.

To call them “maker’s marks” is also incorrect; for most Westerners, the only part of a
Chinese silver mark they might understand is either a name that appears in Latin letters or
initials. If a name appears, it is highly likely to be a fictitious name - a name devised to be
auspicious rather than actually inform one of the existence of an actual person. Where
there are initials, they also will refer to a fictional name.

The most important fact is that almost always the English name or initials are not the name
of the actual maker; it will almost certainly be the name of the retail silversmith or, more
correctly, the name under which he trades. Naturally, because of the way Chinese society
was then structured, all Chinese silversmiths and retail silversmiths were male.

Chinese silver produced prior to the late 18th century was often unmarked. The Tientsin
and the Shanghai “9 Factories” silversmiths were the most consistent in their marking, but
unlike their Canton counterparts, it was purely in Chinese ideogrammatic form. The degree
of conformity of these makers was more a product of happenstance, rather than by any
conscious collaborative agreement.