by Huan Hsu
I struck up a conversation with an older woman hanging out in the hall, fanning herself. She introduced herself as Mrs. Chen and said that she had come to Fuliang from Jiangsu with her parents when she was twelve. The ceremonial hall had functioned as an elementary school from 1954 to 1978, and she had attended in the 1960s. She called my attention to the rafters, where the beams still bore banners that had been posted during the Cultural Revolution, proclaiming slogans like “Long Live Chairman Mao” and “Defeat the American Imperialists.” After the school moved to a new location, the hall had been a fruit market and a sweets factory, among other things. It became a tourist spot about ten years ago, and all the buildings had been rebuilt in the past couple of years. The actual Fuliang archives that I sought were long gone, but Mrs. Chen didn’t know where they went.
The woman working the photo booth beckoned for my camera and offered to take a few pictures, posing me and Mrs. Chen at the magistrate’s desk. I thanked her and held my hand out for my camera.
“That’ll be ten kuai,” she said.
What could I do? I paid her ten kuai.
JINGDEZHEN WASN’T just full of ancient shards and ugly modern wares. Occasionally authentic, complete antique pieces could be found at the weekly market near the Shiba Qiao area, though it required wading through an acre of fakes. On the way back from the Song dynasty shard piles, Kai E overheard me talking about going to this market and insisted that I take along her husband, a painter and a market regular, to protect myself from getting ripped off.
I met Huang Fei, just as small as his wife, with a round forehead and large, elfish ears, at the entrance to the market just after dawn. The empty streets were quiet, so I heard the market before I saw it: the chimes of shards pouring out of fifty-pound rice sacks onto blankets or bare concrete.
Huang Fei came from Fengcheng, a village about a hundred miles southwest of Jingdezhen. His grandparents had been landowners, having made their money in the leather trade. His great-grandfather committed suicide during the land reforms following the 1949 Communist takeover. His grandfather was sold out to the Communists by a younger brother, jailed for eight years, and sent to work on a farm when he was released. Without any means to care for his family, he had to send Huang Fei’s mother away to be raised by another family. Huang Fei had always liked to draw, which wasn’t much use in the countryside, and had known of Jingdezhen only as the city with the strange name. In 1994, with only a middle school education, he came to Jingdezhen on the advice of an “uncle” who had just set up a factory making reproductions. “Before, I had no impression of porcelain at all,” he said. “It was just cups and bowls to us—what was so interesting about that? But then I got here and started falling in love with porcelain.”
At the reproductions factory, Huang Fei was put in charge of glazes and taught to paint. He had no qualms about copying. It didn’t even register with him. Orders were coming in, and he had to meet a quota every month. “I came from the countryside and got to paint,” he said. “I was happy with that.”
Four years later he happened to meet the same Canadian artist who had introduced Caroline Cheng to Jingdezhen, and invited him to his factory for a tour. The artist told Huang Fei that what he was doing wasn’t painting but copying. That the rebuke came from a laowai made its sting worse. “I was really uncomfortable when he told me that,” Huang Fei said. “So I left and found a blue and white painting teacher. Then I saw all the possibilities, doucai, fencai, while so many people were just doing the same thing over and over.” To describe his departure from the reproduction factory, Huang Fei used the term chulai, or “come out,” rather than the more common likai, or “leave.” I wondered if Huang Fei would really have left if not for a foreigner’s nudge, if that had really been the climax of his awakening or simply the inception, to which he had appended certain realizations in hindsight. Stories are told linearly, but life doesn’t unfurl that way.
He and Kai E had recently opened their own gallery, sometimes selling their work for thousands of RMB. In the back, Huang Fei kept the collection of antique porcelain he had found at the market. “People have been saying that Jingdezhen is dead since I got here,” he said. “ ‘This place is broken, there’s no future in porcelain,’ they said. But every month I’d see people putting out new things, so the tradition is still here.”
The biggest change he had observed over the past few years was the influx of foreigners. His gallery, as well as many others on the same street, owed its existence to Caroline Cheng. “Without her, this place would be so kepa,” Huang Fei said, using a word meaning “horrible” or “terrifying,” the same adjective one would use to describe a scary movie or gruesome crime. “I often compare Jingdezhen to this beautiful old house that was just festering and molding away, and then Caroline came and knocked open the windows and let all this light into it, totally changing it. Before her it was an wu tian ri”—a chengyu meaning both “complete darkness” and “a total absence of justice”—“and now it’s alive again.”
We turned a corner, and the bazaar unfolded. It wasn’t yet seven a.m., but the square was already foggy with the cigarette smoke of browsers and vendors. In the workshops surrounding the market, men sawed and hammered wood into frames for shipping vases taller than me. Chickens stepped through the shards on display. Women wheeled food carts around, squawking singsong, prerecorded advertisements through megaphones: “Dumplings! Roasted yams! Mantou!” Caroline had told me that when she first went to Jingdezhen, the inventory of shards being sold seldom changed; there was hardly any construction turning up fresh soil for people to scavenge. Now one could gauge the city’s projects based on the new shards showing up at the markets.
Huang Fei and I walked through the rows. The idea was to jian lou, literally “check for leaks,” or gather the things that had slipped out of someone’s net or bag. In other words, someone is always going to lose money on a transaction, and so better the vendor than me. There is a saying in Jingdezhen that, unlike gold or jade, porcelain has no price. Gold and jade are commodities with agreed-upon values. But porcelain depends on what one is willing to pay for it.
I saw Song celadon shards from Nanshijie, delicate blue and white fragments of teacups, chunks of cisterns, saggers glazed in lustrous purples. I had been told that although most of the shards in the market were indeed ancient, few were imperial, because the former imperial kilns were off-limits to hunters, and those vendors who did have imperial shards usually knew what they had. The majority of the shards with imperial marks on their bases were from much later periods, when emperors were too occupied with court intrigue, foreign incursions, and domestic unrest to care if a civil kiln misappropriated the royal seal, and the reign marks were applied not to trick customers but as homages to great periods of Chinese history (which is why Qianlong, Kangxi, and Yongzheng are such popular marks).
Beyond the shards lay blankets covered with old-looking, intact porcelain of all shapes, ages, and sizes. I had been warned that 99.9 percent of such items in the market weren’t what they purported to be. But that sliver of possibility of finding an authentic antique, something my great-great-grandfather might have owned, kept me searching, and I was determined—or desperate—enough to sift through all the fakes.
Fake Chinese antiques aren’t a new phenomenon. Already in 1712 Xavier d’Entrecolles wrote that Jingdezhen potters had perfected the “art of imitating old porcelain being passed for being three or four centuries old or at least of the preceding dynasty of Ming.” Copying was a Chinese tradition. The Yuan copied the Song, the Ming copied the Yuan, and so on. There was never any sense in ancient China that copying was a violation. They called it “standing on others’ shoulders to reach new heights.”
“All this copying, faking, lying to people—it’s a very ancient attitude,” Huang Fei told me. “They think if you can’t pick out the fake, it’s your fault. You’re the one with no education, no culture. And if you’re stuck with a fake, you’ll hide it away because you don’t
want people to know you were taken. As long as people are involved, you’ll never cut out the problem. But with art, if you have real and fake, it’s more fun. Without fakes, it’s like a grocery store with determined prices. How interesting is that?”
To Huang Fei, it was all part of a game. Perhaps there is a reason the Chinese say they “play” porcelain instead of “collect.” “Sometimes we see people spend lots of money on a fake, we won’t say anything,” Huang Fei said. “Consider the loss their tuition. Everyone pays it.”
In fact, when I polled Jingdezhen students or locals about mustsee places in town, they often mentioned the Fang Jia Jing neighborhood (named for the Fang family but fittingly also a homonym for “to imitate”) near the railroad station, a whole village of workshops devoted to reproducing ancient ceramics. The entire history of China’s ceramics can be found in the Fang Jia Jing’s rows of shops selling Yuan blue and whites, Qing enamelware, or Ming meipings, every single one counterfeit. There is nothing secret about what happened in the Fang Jia Jing. The narrow alleys echo with the chimes of pumice stone working over porcelain to dull their finishes, after which vendors brush on thin brown paint and refire the pieces at low temperatures to achieve an aged tint. Counterfeiters set wares on a layer of rice husks to impart the faint red that was prevalent during the mid–Ming dynasty. And knead clay by foot, to add large air bubbles into the bodies so they would weigh the same as those created before machine mixing. And research clay, glaze, and firing recipes to match the methods and materials of previous centuries. Persian cobalt used in blue and white Yuan wares, for example, has high iron and magnesium content that results in iron spots where the glaze pools. They scavenge kaolin from the same mines that had supplied it for the original they are copying. They tumble objects in mud to study where wear and dust collect. Or they might build a new body onto an authentic base, which is why bases command the highest prices for shards. Some vendors even sink new objects into the sea to cover them with barnacles so they can pass them off as recovered shipwreck items.
“We don’t use ‘real’ or ‘fake’ with these things,” one student told me. “We use ‘old’ or ‘new,’ or ‘copy.’ It’s only fake if it’s not porcelain. They’re real. They’re just not the original ones. And only one person can own the original one. What about the rest of the people?”
Recently the Chinese have begun to use a new word to describe faked or copied products: shanzhai. Literally, shanzhai describes a fenced place in the forest, or a fortified mountain village. Metaphorically, it recalls mountain bandits, Robin Hood–like characters who evaded or opposed the authorities (acts that, given the famously corrupt Qing court, gained them the moral high ground) and stole from rich Mandarins. The idea of shanzhai has since spread to become a philosophical term for “rebel innovation.”
So if an entire nation of people don’t think something is wrong, then is it? It made me wonder just what was real, what were those objects I sought, and what their value was. How would I know the difference between my great-great-grandfather’s collection and a bunch of fakes? Not only had this stream of reproductions, like the rest of Jingdezhen’s history, never been cut—I fake, therefore I am—but they also represented some of the city’s highest-quality and greatest expertise. I recalled Takeshi’s advice to me about the antiques market. “The most important question you should ask is not ‘Is it real?’ ” he said, “but ‘Is it beautiful?’ ” Given the ends to which the counterfeiters pursue authenticity, and how that keeps alive Jingdezhen’s ancient traditions, it is kind of beautiful.
As we walked through the market, Huang Fei bought a ginger jar, a Song dynasty cup, and a bowl melted into a sagger. All the shard hunters were right about seeing a critical mass of ceramics. Despite all the items in the market, I had spent enough time looking at porcelain to roughly group them into periods and types, patterns of a larger tapestry. I started looking for interruptions in the pattern, and on our way out of the market, my eye caught something that didn’t belong: a large envelope adorned with crossed Kuomintang and Republic of China flags and official script and seals. Huang Fei and I immediately picked it up. “Jinling Museum Collection,” read the text, written right to left. Huang Fei turned the envelope over. A paper seal had been applied over the flap and read, “Republic of China National Palace Museum, Republic of China Nanjing Provisional Government.” Below that was a faded red stamp from the ministry of the interior.
The seller told us the envelope was one hundred RMB. “What’s inside?” I asked.
“Beats me,” he said. “What’s it say on it?”
According to the information on the envelope, it was an official packet from the collection of the National Palace Museum containing a piece of calligraphy by an early Qing dynasty scholar. Was this part of the National Palace Museum’s collection that Chiang Kai-shek had tried to keep from the Japanese, which might have explained why an ancient poem had been folded up into an envelope? If imperial porcelains could wind up in fields near Kaifeng during the frantic move, it seemed perfectly reasonable for a small envelope to find its way to a market in Jingdezhen.
“Can we see if there’s actually anything inside?” I asked.
“You can if you buy it,” the seller said. “You can do whatever you want with it after you buy it.”
Huang Fei and I had a quick, hushed discussion. “What do you think?” I whispered. “Could this be real?”
He examined the envelope, picking at the folds and seals to see if it had been artificially aged. “It might be,” he said. “This is a famous calligrapher. Even I’ve heard of him. But I don’t know anything about calligraphy. And I’m not sure about this envelope. It could be fake.” For a hundred RMB, it seemed worth the risk. We each put up fifty RMB and agreed to split any possible proceeds equally. My heart raced as we walked around the corner, and Huang Fei phoned a friend who was a calligraphy expert to tell him we had something for him to inspect. Unable to wait, Huang Fei opened the envelope. Inside, we found a two-foot square of heavy, gold-flecked paper stained the color of tea that unfolded to reveal a calligraphed poem. It could not have looked more fake. We had been taken. Huang Fei tore apart a corner of the envelope, and the interior seams were bright white, which he said proved that the envelope had been artificially stained. He called his friend to say we weren’t coming after all. We vowed not to tell Kai E about this. “That’s our tuition for the day,” Huang Fei said. “Don’t worry, I’ve paid a lot of tuition in my time. That’s the lesson—if you don’t know what you’re looking at, don’t buy it. Even if it’s only ten RMB, you’re wasting that money.”
ONE EVENING, as I sat with some friends in a bar in the Sculpture Factory’s courtyard, two women dressed in vacation chic walked in, and the taller one ordered a beer in the unmistakable accent of an ABC. Edie Hu was the Chinese ceramics specialist at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, on her annual retreat to Jingdezhen to decompress in a Pottery Workshop studio and work on her burgeoning ceramics hobby. We were about the same age and had similar experiences with our Chinese-ness, and she offered to host me if I ever felt like attending an auction in Hong Kong.
We kept in touch and I eventually had saved enough for a trip. The Sotheby’s offices, on the thirty-first floor of the Pacific Place tower overlooking the sparkling waters of Victoria Harbor, felt light-years from Jingdezhen, yet many of Jingdezhen’s finest creations passed through here on their way to new owners. In the conference room, Edie brought out a selection of the best lots from the upcoming auction season. I was surprised to see her carrying the pieces—worth millions of dollars—in her bare hands. “I do worry sometimes about tripping or bumping into someone and dropping a priceless vase,” she said. “So I hold them really close.” When she walked around the office, she tucked them in the crook of her elbow like a football and kept her free hand ready to cover the exposed part or stiff-arm an inattentive colleague; women in the ceramics department also weren’t permitted to wear heels.
Edie’s grandfather had grown
up in a wealthy banking family in Shanghai. Like my great-great-grandfather, he collected porcelain and lots of it. “During the twenties and thirties, you had access to really nice stuff,” Edie said. “The Qing dynasty was falling, so you could go to Beijing and buy imperial porcelain from the eunuchs—that’s how some of the great European collections got formed. My grandfather liked to buy monochromes, and in pairs, and he had to buy something every day.”
During the civil war Edie’s grandfather moved to Hong Kong, entrusting the Shanghai Museum with most of his porcelain collection. He intended to return for it but never did, and the new Communist government wasn’t interested in repatriating the belongings of landed gentry. Edie’s father left Hong Kong to study engineering at Stanford and settled in the Bay Area, where Edie was born and expressed the family’s porcelain gene. She graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art history and obtained a master’s degree in Chinese art and archaeology from the University of London before going to work at the Shanghai Museum, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and then Sotheby’s. “We had some of my grandfather’s pieces at home, and as I got older, no one in my family could tell me anything about them,” she said. “My dad wasn’t interested at all, probably because he saw how my grandfather was so obsessive, always telling my dad to be careful around his things.” Her grandfather had good reason. In 1985 one of his Ming dynasty goldfish jars became the first porcelain object to break the $1 million barrier at auction.
We started in the Ming dynasty with one of the “star lots” of the upcoming auction, a fifteenth-century double gourd flask made during the emperor Xuande’s reign. Xuande was one of the first emperors to put reign marks on his porcelain, and his pieces were known for having a smooth clay body and tiny bubbles in the glaze, like the pebbling of an orange peel. Next, Edie brought out an extremely rare vase from the emperor Chenghua’s reign, designed with plantain leaves and floral motifs. The white was more intense, and the glaze was tighter, without the bubbling of the Xuande era. The reign mark had been defaced, but that didn’t affect the price, Edie said, which was estimated at 15 to 20 million Hong Kong dollars (2 to 3 million U.S. dollars). “The marks that matter are Qing dynasty ones,” she said. “With a Qianlong or Yongzheng mark, you can ask for premium prices. Without them, it’s just called ‘Eighteenth Century.’ ”