Page 932 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

YI BO
Hong Kong
circa 1890-1940

A manufacturing artisan silversmith who was renowned for working with the retail silversmith Wang Hing & Co.

Yi Bo was responsible for creating
items of silver that bore silver marks
that were to cause so much confusion
almost a hundred years after the time
they were originally made. For reasons
unknown, the Yi Bo workshop used an
inverted ‘G’ to represent the figure ‘9’
and used an inverted ‘M’ for the letter
‘H’. For several decades, the mark was
interpreted as being ‘HM’, where in
reality it was ‘WH’ for Wang Hing.

A cushion-form box [left] with applied
dragon motif was also catalogued as
being “HM” and is simply an inverted
Wang Hing silver mark

An extremely high quality and
accomplished circa 1895 tea
pot [right] bearing the marks of
Yi Bo and Wang Hing

Images courtesy of http://chinese-export-silver.com Image Library Archive