by Huan Hsu
Perhaps because he was too devoted to his porcelain, Chenghua wasn’t a very good emperor. He had a domineering first wife, nearly twenty years his senior, who was so paranoid that she forced abortions or poisoned the mothers of Chenghua’s other children. Somehow one son managed to stay hidden for almost six years before Chenghua even knew of his existence, and he became Chenghua’s successor, the emperor Hongzhi. Hongzhi, a precocious child and brilliant student, lowered taxes and instituted transparency in government. Instead of killing corrupt officials and their families, he arranged for their safe passage home after their dismissal. He sought to end the practice of castration and the institution of eunuchs, and he redistributed the properties of deceased eunuchs to victims of flood, drought, and other natural disasters. He was also the only monogamous emperor in Chinese history, ensuring a clean, smooth succession. Unfortunately, his son turned out to be a reckless ruler who, despite spending most of his short reign smothering himself with drink and prostitutes, managed to undo just about all his father’s accomplishments before he died at age thirty.
By the end of the Ming dynasty, porcelain decorations had become loose, and the paint became stiffer, more mechanical. Porcelain quality—attention to detail, creativity, and technology—picked up again in the Qing, during Kangxi’s reign, and remained high until Jiaqing. The country was flush, the emperor poured money and resources into the industry, and craftsmen experimented relentlessly. Then porcelain declined during the Opium Wars and never recovered. Some high-quality pieces were made at the end of the Qing dynasty, notably under Cixi’s rule, but most were neither remarkable then nor highly collectible now. “You can see the rise and fall of China in the quality of the ceramics,” Edie said.
Most of the lots that Edie showed me had one or more old catalog stickers on them. The stickers had discolored and frayed over the decades and disrupted the otherwise pristine surfaces of the objects. “Do you remove them before the auction?” I asked.
Edie’s eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she said. “Some of these stickers are worth thousands of dollars in themselves. They’re one of the most important ways of proving provenance, showing that they belonged to an important or well-known collection. People try to reuse them or fake them all the time.”
The last piece Edie showed me was a blue and white Ming dynasty tankard about seven inches tall, scheduled for a Paris auction. It had been purchased at a flea market in France. The diaspora of Chinese antiquities often followed the foreign troops that were stationed in proximity to royal abodes. The French and English ransacked the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, and during the Boxer Rebellion eight foreign legations had troops inside the Forbidden City. The Germans were closest to the hall of portraits, which was how many of China’s best paintings ended up in German museums and collections. The French were stationed near the hall where the imperial seals were kept, so imperial seals sometimes surfaced at markets in Paris or Lyon.
“The woman at the market was asking for something like one hundred twenty euro, and the guy who bought it bargained it down to sixty euro,” Edie said.
The tankard, listed in the catalog at 150,000 euro, would end up selling for 720,000 euro. It amazed me that despite so much demand and such readily available information, pieces like this could still appear. One of the most popular items for Jingdezhen’s porcelain imitators to reproduce was a white ovoid Qing dynasty vase adorned with pastel-colored famille rose peaches on a branch. Made during Yongzheng’s reign, the original vase wound up in the possession of the American ambassador to Israel, who used it as a lamp base for fifty years. When the Sotheby’s experts received a photograph of it—with lampshade and all—in the early 2000s, they rushed a team to New York, where the vase sat unprotected in the owner’s home. The shape was rare enough—they knew of only four in the world, and those were all blue and white; one with delicate pinks and vibrant greens was too rare to dream about. Thankfully, the seal on the base had not been drilled through, and the vase sold in Hong Kong in 2002 for $5.3 million to Alice Cheng, heiress to a soy sauce fortune, longtime Sotheby’s client, and mother of Caroline Cheng of the Pottery Workshop.
Stories like these are why auction houses scour the globe for new supply, and they sustained me every time I wondered if perhaps my family had been right, that it was foolish to think that I—illiterate, limited in vocabulary, without guanxi—could recover objects that had been buried three generations ago in a land where time passed like dog years. “One antique dealer I know doesn’t believe in these miracles, but I still do,” Edie said. “They’re out there.”
In November 2010 a small London auction house, Bainbridges, offered a Qianlong-era vase with reticulated double-walled peeka-boo sides revealing a smaller vase nested inside. The sellers claimed to have discovered it while cleaning out a dead relative’s attic and ascribed its provenance to an “adventurous uncle” who had been in China during the Opium Wars. They happened to see a flyer for Bainbridges and consigned the vase for auction. Bainbridges’ appraiser valued it between $1.2 million and $1.8 million. At auction, the sale went on for half an hour until the hammer came down for an anonymous Chinese buyer bidding by telephone. Taxes and the requisite buyer premium brought the final price to more than $80 million, the most ever paid for a Chinese antiquity.
Chinese interest in its own antiques began only recently. Until the 1980s little got into or out of China. People had no use for imperial porcelains, and the country wasn’t far removed from an era when it was dangerous to own anything besides utilitarian ware. Only once these items found their way to foreign collections did they become important symbols of China. “It took someone else to appreciate them to show that they were beautiful,” Edie said.
Now, spurred by nationalism and economic prosperity, the Chinese nouveau riche are fierce competitors for imperial porcelains. For many Chinese, winning auctions is an act in service of their country, repatriating stolen objects and a step toward undoing the humiliations that China suffered at the hands of invaders and would-be colonists. Sometimes it isn’t clear if the Chinese are more interested in owning their own art or in just keeping it away from the West. In 2009 an adviser for China’s national treasures fund placed the winning bid on two bronzes at a Christie’s auction and then refused to pay, just to sabotage the sale.
The Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions in Hong Kong, long a preserve of stiff-upper-lipped expats, are overrun by armies of wealthy mainlanders with identical buzz cuts, leather loafers and man purses, long pinkie nails, and jade bracelets. Chinese auction houses have jumped into the game. Even the People’s Liberation Army is involved with an auction house. These Chinese auctions are the new Wild West. Nonpayment is so endemic that at some mainland auctions employees run up to the winning bidders as soon as the hammer goes down, to make them sign a promissory note, but even that doesn’t always work. One recent auction treated attendees to the absurd scene of an employee chasing a winning bidder through the salesroom with pen and paper. “They just don’t give a shit,” Edie told me. “They think that all these years they’ve been dumped on by the West and by their own government, and now finally, now that they have money to buy stuff, everyone is going to kiss their ass.” The laws literally don’t apply to many delinquent Chinese buyers, who have friends in the government to protect them. As for that $80 million Qing vase, less than six months after Bainbridges sold it to a Chinese buyer, the auctioneer canceled the sale for nonpayment.
One common tactic buyers use to worm out of paying is to dispute an item’s authenticity. As there are no widely used scientific methods, the age and authenticity of a piece is determined by an expert’s brew of knowledge, experience, and feel. But there isn’t exactly an uproar for any improvements. Too many people stand to benefit from a questionable piece’s inclusion in an auction. So even “genuine” objects with long, detailed provenances become such on the faith of their owners, appraisers, and prospective buyers—a kind of reality by consensus. The director of international
operations for China’s largest private auction house told me that the faking in China is so pervasive that houses resign themselves to knowing that about 30 percent of their lots are fakes. “What’s real, in the end?” he said. “If my boss says something’s an obvious fake, but nine other people say it’s real, should he refuse to put it in auction?”
If independent experts can agree on a piece’s inauthenticity, Sotheby’s will cancel the sale and refund the money. The disputed objects get stashed at the office until the next wave of pieces come through, and are then moved to storage. If no one claims them, they become study pieces for authenticating other items. The Sotheby’s storage facility is full of unclaimed or unpaid-for pieces, an entire collection of expensive antique porcelain mired in limbo until someone acknowledges a piece’s existence by making good on the sale. Some of the orphaned lots disappeared into storage for so long that the storage fees owed for them outstripped their value.
And if even experts can’t distinguish between the counterfeits and the authentic antiques, I wondered what good it was to have the “real” thing. How sure could I be that the priceless porcelains on display at the National Palace Museums were authentic? What if my grandmother still owned a vase that she claimed to have belonged to my great-great-grandfather? Would I have believed her? Would that have been enough for me? Why did I insist on seeing everything for myself?
Caroline and Takeshi were right. Preserving history doesn’t mean saving historical things. What keeps art, and history, alive is the continuation of making, seeking, and transferring information. There aren’t enough vases in the world to contain one family’s past, much less the constellation to which it belongs. And finding my family’s porcelain would no better preserve its history than herding old craftsmen into a bamboo cage for tourists to watch. I still wanted to find the porcelain. But I began to understand that first I had to reconnect with the remaining links to my family’s history. Unlike Jingdezhen, however, the surviving members of my family could not live forever.
I GOT TO KNOW Caroline well enough to ask her for advice on digging for my family’s porcelain. She told me to find Jiang Yi Ming, the director of the ancient ceramics research center near the Long Zhu Pavilion in Jingdezhen. The research center had official permission to make digs, she said, and might be persuaded to help me. I hurried down to the research center, but the cleaning ladies at the doorway told me it was closed and shooed me away when I tried to ask when it would reopen. I retraced my route back to the five-story Long Zhu Pavilion, which I had seen many times but not yet visited. The pavilion had been one of the nerve centers of Ming dynasty Jingdezhen, and as recently as 1989 piles upon piles of imperial shards covered the area. A visitor could have collected as many rare imperial copper red fragments as he could carry.
Now bricks and sheet metal walled off the grounds to discourage shard hunters, and I had to buy a ticket to enter. The earth was spongy with ceramic material, a mélange of spacers, saggers, kiln bricks, tiles, and shards loosely bound by soil. Somehow this porous substrate managed to anchor two immense camphor trees, which the docent told me were three hundred years old. Other than the groups of men on the grounds playing cards and smoking, I was the only visitor.
The pavilion had been turned into a museum, though only the odd-numbered floors were open. But the display cases ringing the small rooms showed a good selection of Ming dynasty pieces from the Hongwu, Yongle, Xuande, and Chenghua eras: large blue and white vessels and chargers, fine copper red bowls and stemmed cups, small doucai cricket jars, and celadon meiping vases. The majority had been glued back together from shards, and there was a wonderful photograph of four men squatting over a shard-strewn courtyard in the ancient ceramic research center, pawing through the pieces in search of the right ones to complete the large, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle behind them: a blue and white cistern adorned with a dragon.
These objects on display, despite their visible imperfections and blank fillings where replacement pieces couldn’t be found, which might have been cobbled together from any number of different originals, captivated me. They weren’t representations of history, they were history, five-hundred-year-old visitors unearthed from beneath my feet, and in their travel to the present, they carried not just their own history but also mine. They were artifacts not just of their time but also of the time between us. These shards were what I dreamed of finding, just as much as my great-great-grandfather’s complete collection and certainly more than the imperial antiques in museums or auctions.
I love shards because they are as permanent as anything can be in China. Houses can disappear, textiles can disintegrate, and vases can be smashed. But no matter how much Jingdezhen and other former porcelain capitals build over their ancient foundations, shards will remain, and even if they manage to remove every last one of them, they will endure, somewhere. My great-great-grandfather’s porcelain might not be where he left it, or how he left it, but there was comfort in knowing that some things cannot be erased. And maybe those shards hold kernels of all the things that China has lost and could, over time, reanimate them.
The next morning I returned to the research center, a well-preserved Ming-Qing dynasty house with ivy-rimmed white walls and a large courtyard—the government always managed to get the best buildings. Groups of shards and saggers covered the courtyard and interior porch. Also on the porch were two men and a woman sitting on benches at a wooden table, a laptop computer and papers spread before them.
“What do you want?” one of them asked.
“I’m looking for Mr. Jiang,” I said.
“There is no Jiang here,” he said.
“Really?” I explained that I was visiting from America and had some questions about porcelain, emphasizing that Zheng Yi, Caroline’s Chinese name, had told me to come find the director, a Mr. Jiang Yi Ming.
“Yes, I know Zheng Yi,” said the other man, wearing denim shorts and a striped polo shirt and looking much friendlier than the first man. “But there is no one by the name of Jiang here.”
“Oh, well, sorry,” I said.
I left and sat outside by the entrance for a while, trying to think of what to do next. The man in the polo shirt came out to buy cigarettes. “Excuse me,” I said. “This is the ancient ceramics research center, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “But we told you, there is no Zhang here.”
They had thought I had been saying “Zhang” the whole time. “No,” I said. “I’m looking for a Jiang.”
“Oh, Jiang!” the man said. “Yes, he’s here. He was the tall, thin guy at the table. Follow me.”
Mr. Jiang didn’t look happy to see me but gestured for me to sit down once I invoked Caroline’s name. Just as I was about to tell him the story of my family’s porcelain, his phone rang. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been called to a meeting. Maybe next time.”
“Can I come back later today?”
“Sure, come by later.”
“What’s convenient for you?” I asked. “I’ll work with your schedule.”
He didn’t answer, clearly not intending to make an appointment with me. I stared at him while he squirmed. “Uh, maybe eleven a.m.,” he said finally.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll wait for you.”
We stood. Mr. Jiang was half a head shorter than me and not particularly thin. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can walk and talk.”
He strode toward Zhushan Road, moving faster than I had ever seen a Chinese person walk, while I tried to keep up and ask about the possibility of digging. I wasn’t even sure if he was listening until he said, “You can’t just go digging willy-nilly.”
“I know, that’s why I’m asking—”
“We can’t, either,” he said. “We have to go do a careful investigation first. There are too many of these stories like yours. I suggest you go to the archives first, learn about your family, find the burial site, and find out about the site. Then come back. There are just too many of these stories.”
“There might have been imperial pieces,” I said, hoping that might get his attention.
“Go to the archives,” he said, shaking his head. “Just so many of these stories.”
“How do I check the archives?” We arrived at the Imperial Kiln Museum.
“Check the Jingdezhen archives on Lian She Road,” he said. “Everyone knows where it is.” He practically sprinted through the entrance of the museum.
When I found Lian She Road, a woman directed me up to the lotus pond at its terminus. At the pond another woman pointed to a dilapidated building across the street. “It’s that way,” she said. “See if they’re still there.”
They were not. The building’s roof had caved in, and its double wooden doors were padlocked. A motorcycle taxi driver waiting for a fare told me that the archives had outgrown the building and moved two years ago to Xinqiao, just east of the old city. I cursed Mr. Jiang and hired the driver to take me to the new archives, a narrow, six-floor concrete box near a tangle of train tracks. I wandered the floors until I ran into a man who told me to go to the fourth floor. All the doors along the hallway were closed, but I heard what sounded like a meeting behind the last one. A small man with a wide mouth eventually emerged. I introduced myself, and he invited me into his office. We sat on bamboo chairs, his feet swinging a few inches above the floor. His name was also Liu, but he was not from Jiujiang. “If you know this relative’s name, we can look it up, sure,” he said. “We’ll just check all the Fuliang records of xian zhang. It should be easy. Come back tomorrow morning, and we’ll look it up.”