Bottle ID: 472

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HORNBILL, BAI SHI, CARVED

Date: 1820-1850

Height: 58 mm

A hornbill (heding) snuff bottle, well hollowed, of flattened ovoid form, carved in low relief on the front with a figure sitting under a pine tree issuing from a rocky outcrop with three sheep around him, all under scrolling clouds; the reverse with almost the same inscription in differing scripts reading in seal script:
Made by Yu Yuan, let this display cauldron be treasured and used forever”
beside an inscription in regular script reading:
“The text states: Made by Yu Yuan, let this display cauldron be treasured and used forever”
and with two seals, Bai shi,
the sides carved using the red skin of the bill with writhing Qilong.

Similar Examples:

Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle - The J & J Collection, 1993, Vol. II, pp. 473-474, no. 283.
Kleiner, Robert. Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection of John Ault, 1990, p. 60, no. 104.
Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles - The Mary and George Bloch Collection, 2009, Vol. 7, Part 1, pp. 255-263, no. 1569.

Provenance:

Asian Art Studio
Isabel Torbert
The Collection of Dorothy Brink Torbert (prior to 1969)

Collectors have coveted hornbill snuff bottles for many years even before Lilla Perry in her now-famous book ‘Chinese Snuff Bottles – The Adventures and Studies of a Collector’ tempted them with a whole chapter devoted to ‘The Story of the Famous Hornbill’. In 1950 the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania published their fascinating December bulletin on ‘The Story of Hornbill Ivory’. The reference to ivory in the title comes from the “Helmeted Hornbill” (Rhinoplax vigil) that is used in Chinese carving and more specifically for snuff bottles. Only this variety of Hornbill, amongst the sixty in the Eastern hemisphere, has a solid casque (epithema) at the front of the head above the beak, which can be carved. The remaining varieties have casques, which, in some cases are visually more imposing, but are either hollow or filled with a spongy tissue. The solid, hard ivory-like substance which forms the casque is very dense and is covered at the top and sides by a vividly brilliant sheath of red and it is this color in combination with the ‘ivory’ that has made this material so highly prized for carvings such as snuff bottles. The Chinese, in comparison to their neighbors, were late in discovering hornbill, which was found south of China. In the Ming Dynasty it appeared in their records in the lists of tributes from foreign nations as heding, which may have been an attempt to reproduce the Malay word gading, meaning ivory (although hoting means ‘cranes crest’). In 1371, Mahommed Shah, the King of Northern Borneo sent some tribute pieces to the Ming Court and included heding as one of the presentation pieces. Interestingly, two types of hornbill are documented in the official Ming records, both of which were imported from Makassar – the plain heding and the golden matrix heding. The value of a single piece of heding at this time was a thousand cash, compared with elephant ivory, which cost five hundred cash per pound! Snuff bottles were not the only object fashioned from this rare material during the Qing Dynasty; other items included belt buckles, plume holders and archer’s rings. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Guangzhou was the center of carving for this material with most of the material being fashioned into European style jewelry for export. Parallel to this development, the Japanese also worked in hornbill, initially under the impression that it came from the bone of the head of a phoenix, but realizing it was not good karma to slaughter a magical bird, they concluded that it was really from the head-bone of a Chinese crane. They obtained their hornbill from Chinese traders at the port of Nagasaki until 1868 when Japan opened.
The inscriptions on this bottle appear to have been taken from an 18th century popular guide to bronze vessels and their inscriptions entitled: Liuyi zhi yilu (A Single Record for the Six Arts), 1709.

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