Fig. 1. Signed by Yunshan.

Fig. 3. Signed by Rensong.Fig. 2. Signed by Shouling zhuren.

4 5

COCONUT-SHELL SNUFF BOTTLESHugh Moss and Stuart Sargent

Coconut-shell Chinese snuff bottles present special

challenges to the connoisseur when it comes to dating and attribution. Part of their appeal lies in the fact that they seem to have been carved and signed by ordinary members of the literate elite, not by anonymous artisans working in imperial or private workshops. Indeed, the relative simplicity of their construction, most of them being made of two curving segments of coconut shell held together by glue, bamboo pegs, or a combination of the two, makes it conceivable that they were constructed, in many cases, by the same persons who carved them: do-it-yourself snuff bottles for personal enjoyment or presentation to friends.

The research on Yangzhou overlay-glass snuff bottles we published recently in these pages (Spring 2011) provides an instructive contrast. Those snuff bottles clearly required a specialized workshop to produce, and workshops require patrons or customers. The names and

seals that appear on the glass-overlay bottles generally belong to the patrons who ordered them, probably over the course of several years, not to the glassmakers who made them; these people were obviously wealthy enough to order personalized snuff bottles, and it is no surprise that with persistence and good luck we can identify many of them, for they were offi ce holders, rare-book collectors, owners of well-known gardens, philanthropists, and businessmen, and any one of these identities would be enough to leave traces in the rich documentary record that Chinese civilization seems to produce as part of its genius.

Coconut-shell snuff bottles, because they so often feature the names of both the carver and the person to whom the bottle is to be presented, would seem to offer even more clues to tie them to particular people, dates, and places, but in most cases the courtesy names or sobriquets used are either found nowhere in the written record or, equally vexing, are associated with individuals so numerous and mentioned so fl eetingly in the texts available to us that there is no way to

decide which, if any, is our “person of interest.” For

example, there are two known bottles signed

with the name Yunshan (one written 云山, one 雲山, but both probably by the same person), a name that is known to have been used

by approximately twenty late-Qing and

early Republican individuals. One bottle (fig. 1) is

dedicated to a Rongsheng 榮生, giving us the tantalizing hope that, if we can identify a Rongsheng who lived at the same time as one of the people using the name Yunshan and, ideally, place them in the same location at some point in their lives, we would know who carved the bottle for whom. This matching of individuals was our fi rst tack in researching coconut-shell snuff bottles. In this case, we found that among the people who used the name Yunshan, there was a Wang Du 王度 who lived from 1896 to 1978; he was a sculptor who decorated buildings around the lower Yangzi delta; he was also a painter, and he studied woodworking. So here was an artist who was at home with cutting tools. Among the people who used the name Rongsheng was an inkstone carver named Chen Jie 陳介 (1892–1959), commonly called Chen Duanyou 端友. He lived in Shanghai, although he was a native of Changshu 常熟, near Suzhou. We note that the bottle is dedicated to “fourth elder brother” Rongsheng and that Chen Jie was four years older than Wang Du; also that they were active in the same general region and shared an interest in the plastic arts. Therefore, this is a possible match. However, we are far from proving that Wang Du knew Chen Jie, and if Yunshan was such a common name among identifi able people, we have to assume that there were many other Yunshans unknown to us who could have carved this bottle.

An additional consideration is that, as with several other snuff bottles we have examined for this study, if we accept these identifi cations for this particular bottle, we push the practice of carving coconut-shell snuff bottles

well into the twentieth century, a time when we assume machine-rolled cigarettes to have dominated the nicotine-delivery industry. To be sure, snuff was still used in the hinterland and in certain social circles, especially among Mongols and Peking-opera afi cionados, but despite the appearance of certain names from the theatre world among those who adopted some of the sobriquets we fi nd on these coconut-shell snuff bottles (none with a certain link to the bottles, so far), there is no evidence that these bottles were the special province of minorities and actors. This raises the possibility that coconut-shell snuff bottles represent a handicraft that at some point was divorced from the practical function of containing snuff but whose products continued to be used as gifts and treasured as art. If so, the situation would resemble that of the inside-painted snuff bottles that were prominent at the same time. However, coconut-shell bottles, while fascinating in ways that we hope will become apparent in the pages to follow, did not require the highly specialized skills of the inside painter, nor were they made from rare and precious materials. In a post-snuff culture and below the radar of collctors, they would not have had a market suffi cient to support professional carvers. Any argument for attributing a bottle to the early twentieth century must be considered suspect until such time as there is independent evidence (from memoirs, inventories of goods or belongings, or contemporary literature) that coconut-shell snuff bottles were still being made and used.

Given the diffi culties of establishing the identities of the carvers and dedicatees of these snuff bottles based on names alone, we have concentrated on a subset of bottles that take their decoration from sources that can be dated with some degree of confi dence. These are the coconut-shell snuff bottles carved with copies of inscriptions from ancient bronze vessels, Han-dynasty tile ends, or objects of similar antiquity. In most, if not all,

of the cases involving bronze inscriptions, the vessels themselves were no longer extant or would have been unavailable to the carvers of the bottles, but their inscriptions were published in books that were obviously available to whoever carved these snuff bottles. Fortunately, with modern reference works, once we identify an inscription, we can fi nd out exactly where and when it has been published.

When we are dealing with bronze inscriptions, there are four variables to check. First, if the snuff bottle gives the inscription a brief title, does it agree with the title in one or more of the published sources? Second, are there details in the characters that differ in the published sources, and if so, which source most closely resembles the bottle in these details? Third, if the snuff bottle provides a transliteration of the inscription into standard, regular script (kaishu 楷書), does its interpretation agree with the published sources? Some bronze-inscription characters resisted interpretation (many still do), and the sources will often translate them differently. Fourth, does the snuff bottle include a commentary on the inscription, and can that be traced to a particular publication? A fi fth variable that is usually not relevant in the case of bronze inscriptions is the format of the inscription: whether

it is arranged in columns, in curved arcs, or in circles appears to have been driven by the design requirements of the bottle shape as seen by the carver, with no evident compulsion to match the format of the original bronze inscription. However, with tile ends and conventional inscriptions on various Han-dynasty articles, the snuff bottles tend to copy the format of the original inscription, as we shall see.

Let us start with one coconut-shell snuff bottle (fig. 2) that gives a title consistent with its three possible source texts and provides no transcription or commentary. It is unique among the bronze-inscription coconut-shell snuff bottles in telling us when and where it was made: it bears an era name and cyclical date combination that corresponds to 1869.

That, by the way, is forty-four years after the earliest bottle with a similarly unambiguous date, shown in figure 3, which was carved in 1825 by a Rensong 仁松 for a Shaoxiong 少雄. (Neither person is identifi able with any known individual who was active then; the inscription is interesting mainly because it also appears on scrolls by twentieth-century calligraphers, usually with slightly better wording.1) Only one other coconut-shell snuff bottle is dated with both an era name and a cyclical designation: the bottle

Fig. 6. 1716 version of inscription in fig. 2. Fig. 7. 1719 version of inscription in fig. 2.

Fig. 4. Signed by Lanpo [Orchid slope].

Fig. 5. 1603 version of inscription in fig. 2. Courtesy of Harvard University.

6 7

in figure 4, carved in 1872. Although it does not bear a bronze-vessel inscription of the type we are focusing on in this article, we should mention in passing that it can be associated with Suzhou, which is relevant to many of the other bottles we shall discuss. First of all, the carver, who identifies himself as Orchid Slope, Lanpo 蘭坡, specifies that he is from Suzhou. Secondly, the four poems carved on one side were published in 1866 in the Fanyintang shicun 梵隱堂詩存 (10:8a–8b) by the monk Zuguan 祖觀, who was a Suzhou monk.2 They are his Xiti lanhua si jue戲題蘭花四絕 (Four quatrains in jest on orchids). The poem on the other side remains unidentified as of this writing.

The dates on these three bottles allow us to say with certainty that coconut-shell snuff bottles were carved at least from 1825 to 1872. Of course, that by no means rules out the attribution of other bottles to earlier or later dates.

The bottle in figure 2 tells us not only that it was made in 1869 but also that its maker identifies with a district of Suzhou: Changzhou 長洲. (The name should not be confused with the homophonous Changzhou 常州, and it surely has nothing to do with the small island southwest of Hong Kong called Cheung Chau 長洲, where no one in 1869 would have had the source texts or the interest to carve a snuff bottle like this.) The bottle also gives the name of its maker, Shouliang zhuren 守良主人, “The master of the [Studio for] Preserving Goodness.” We have been unable to identify this individual.

Let us turn, then, to the bronze inscription on the Shouliang zhuren bottle. There are three works known to have published the ancient inscription from which it is derived. The first is the Bogu tulu 博古圖錄, generally attributed to Wang Fu 王黼 (1079–1126). First published in 1123, it went through many editions. Looking at the relevant page (3.27b) in a 1603 edition (fig. 5, courtesy of Harvard University), we can see right away that Shouliang zhuren has rejected the neat columns of the

bronze-script original, tipping some of the characters to one side (see the second characters in the first and last columns, 尨 and 年, respectively) or squeezing them together on a diagonal axis rather than a vertical one (the third and fourth characters in the first column, 生and 室). We could say that Shouliang zhuren was taking his inspiration from the original bronze inscription rather than copying it, but details in some of the characters point to a different source text as his point of departure. We shall come to those in a moment.

When considering the Bogu tulu as a potential source, we have to take into account the fact that the most recent edition extant in 1869 was probably a 1753 publication, over a century old by then. This made it a treasure reserved for the dedicated book collector. Which brings us to one working hypothesis for our present study: Even though a certain version of a bronze inscription would theoretically be available any time after it was published, by the time several decades had passed after publication only carvers with access to an important collection of rare books would actually be able to see and copy it. This of course applies to the original publications, which were almost always from the Song dynasty, and to Ming reprints, many of which must have been destroyed in the

Qing invasion; we have seen absolutely no indication that snuff-bottle carvers had direct access to any of those sources. But it also applies to Qing reprints of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. We believe that the bottles that take their decoration from a given book are most likely to have been made soon after the book was published—and in the same geographic area, to judge by those cases where we think we know who the carver was.

The second work that could have served as a source for the bottle in figure 2 is the Xiaotang jigu lu 嘯堂集古錄, by Wang Qiu 王俅, printed in 1176 and reprinted in 1811 with critical comments by Zhang Rongjing 張蓉鏡. Zhang, a major bibliophile, was a native of Changshu. Figure 6 shows the relevant entry from a 1985 reprint of the 1176 edition. If Zhang Rongjing’s 1811 edition was reasonably close to this edition, it was not our carver’s model. The character ding 鼎 in the middle column has straight lines projecting from the lower part, whereas both our bottle and the Xue Shanggong version we mention next curve the lines up and down.

The third work publishing the inscription in figure 2 was probably the most important source for our carvers; the key for us is to determine which Qing edition of it they were using. The work is titled Lidai zhong, ding, yi kuanshi 歷代鐘鼎彝款識 (Inscriptions on bells, tripods, and ritual vessels through the ages). By Xue Shanggong 薛尚功, it was engraved on stone in 1144, shortly after its completion, but there were also a manuscript version and tracings of it that were handed down to about 1807 and were considered superior to the stone version by specialists who were able to view them. One Qing edition was copied in 1719 by a Lu Liang 陸亮 of Yushan 虞山 (Changshu); there was also a 1725 edition by his nephew Lu Qi 陸琪. Some sources say the nephew and uncle copied the book in 1719 and that Lu Qi recopied it in 1725; that would be a plausible scenario, also. Their source was a Ming edition

published by Mao Jin 毛晉 (1599–1659), also of Changshu.

We think that the most likely edition of Xue Shanggong’s work to serve as a model for our carvers was a 1797 edition by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1754–1879). That edition must have been based on the same text as the 1719/1725 edition, because in many cases the two are virtually indistinguishable. When they do diverge, however, the snuff bottles conform to the 1797 edition.

This inscription is one of the cases in which the two editions are virtually the same, so the 1985 reprint of the 1719 version shown in figure 7 suffices to demonstrate that Shouliang zhuren was probably looking at one of the editions of Xue Shanggong when he carved the bottle in figure 2, not at the Bogu tulu or Wang Qiu’s work. Comparison of mang 尨 (the second character in the rightmost column) and ding 鼎 (the second character in the middle column) will make this clear: he has the same sharp break between the top and bottom parts of mang and the same round “body” and curved lines projecting from the “legs” of ding.

As mentioned above, Shouliang zhuren included the title of the inscription on his bottle: on the side of the bottle where he gives his name and the date, he identifies the inscription as coming from the Mangsheng ding 尨生鼎 (Mangsheng tripod). This agrees with the three source texts we have introduced. The presently accepted title, however, is Caisheng ding 蔡生鼎. It is no. 2518 in the Yin, Zhou jinwen jicheng 殷周金文集成 (an eighteen-volume compendium of all known Shang- and Zhou-dynasty bronze inscriptions, published in 1984–1994), where the text is transcribed as X 蔡甥 作其鼎，子子孫孫萬年永寶用.The three Song-dynasty works (in their Qing incarnations) call it the Mangsheng ding and transcribe it as X 尨生室作其鼎，子子孫孫萬年永寶用. Like most of the inscriptions we shall see in this study, this one says basically that so-and-so caused this vessel to be made and that it is to be treasured and used for generations to come; we are not concerned with the content per se, and we don’t think the makers of the snuff bottles were interested in the specifics,

either. The significance of the inscriptions lay in their status as the object of cutting-edge scholarship and the fact that they came from high antiquity, which meant that they should be somewhat obscure and unlike the usual poetic inscriptions or auspicious phrases one sees on snuff bottles. For this reason, we shall not translate the inscriptions or discuss the merits of various interpretations.

As noted above, Shouliang zhuren departed from his source text in the positioning of the characters on the “canvas” of the bottle. All three of the source texts we have mentioned, whether using the format of a rubbing or of black lines drawn on a white ground, position them in three columns that are rather neatly aligned, whereas he has tipped some of the characters to one side or another and placed characters that should be one on top of the other in a pair next to each other. This was probably not done to make the whole look more “archaic,” as most real bronze inscriptions consist of straight-standing characters in proper columns; rather, he seems to have

Fig. 8. Signed by Renfu.

Fig. 11. Signed by Lu Jiaming.

Fig. 12. Xue version of fi g. 11 inscription, 1797.

Fig. 9. Signed by Shaoshi and Xiaoshan.

Fig. 10. Signed by Yiqing.

8 9

“made,” after his name. (The alternative on coconut-shell snuff bottles is to use no verb, to use the verb ke 刻, “carved,” or, in one case, to use the verb zhi 製, “made.”) Other examples using zuo are shown in fi gures 8, 9, 10, and 11. Although they take us away from bronze-inscription bottles for a moment (and we record them only in the pious hope that the signifi cance of the signature format might become apparent someday, when we understand the origins of these bottles better), a couple of the “zuo bottles” serve to illustrate an important point: some coconut-shell snuff bottles were carved by more than one person.

For example, the landscape in figure 8, dated the mid-winter month of bingzi, a cyclical date that could correspond to 1816 or 1876, is signed Renfu zuo 仁甫作 (made by Renfu). The other side, where a four-line poem in irregular meter is inscribed, is dedicated to the same Renfu and signed by a Xu Rui: Xu Rui ming bing ke許瑞銘并刻 (Xu Rui wrote the inscription and carved it). Since Renfu does not dedicate the bottle to anyone, it may be that he added his landscape after Xu Rui had carved the bottle as a gift to him.

Figure 9 shows an undated bottle, also with different signatures on each side, each followed by zuo. This time, three people are involved: two carvers and one dedicatee. The side with the orchid is dedicated to a Jieren 介人 and signed Shaoshi zuo 少石作 (made by Shaoshi); the side with a seven-character line on the orchid’s fragrance (Qiwei tanxiang tu yi xia奇味曇香吐異霞 “Rare fl avor and thick incense exude an uncommon mist”) is signed Xiaoshan zuo 小山作. For each of these three names, we have identifi ed several people dating from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, but we still have no evidence by which to posit connections between any of them or to suggest that Jieren and Xiaoshan are the same person, which would make this bottle a token in an exchange between two people only, as in the Renfu – Xu Rui bottle in fi gure 8.

Figure 10 shows another two-signature bottle. This one shifts us back slightly to the antiquarian theme, as it is engraved on one main side with an image of an ancient cloak hook inscribed in bronze script chang shou 長壽 (eternal longevity); the hook has four characters beside it in clerical script, Changshou ban gou長壽半鉤 (Half of an eternal-longevity garment hook), followed by the signature Yiqing zuo 逸卿作 (made by Yiqing). Unfortunately, the name Yiqing was used by many fi gures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether as a name (ming), courtesy name (zi), or sobriquet (hao). However, we might single out Bao Jun 鮑俊 (1795–1851), a Guangdong native, for mention as one who used the sobriquet Yiqing, as he was a highly regarded calligrapher. Moreover, Guangdong was an area in which interest in ancient inscriptions ran high. And Ruan Yuan may have had an infl uence on this interest. Ruan’s Jigu zhai zhong, ding, yiqi kuanshi 積古齋鍾鼎彝器款識 (Inscriptions on bells, tripods, and other ritual vessels from the Jigu zhai) was another important collection of ancient inscriptions. It was completed in 1796 and printed in editions of 1804, 1842, 1879, 1882, and later. The book contains a drawing of a very similar garment hook with an inscription that differs from the one on Yiqing’s bottle only in small details of the character

chang 長. Ruan visited Bao Jun’s native Xiangshan 香山in 1825, when he was still governor-general of Guangdong and

Guangxi; however, Bao was in Beijing at the time,3 so

if Bao Jun got the design for his garment hook from Ruan’s book, it is conceivable that it was from a copy deposited (we

hypothesize) in the Xuehai tang 學海堂 in

Guangzhou, an academy Ruan had founded in 1820; Bao Jun may have seen it there when he

later retired to his home region. This scenario would allow us to date the bottle to roughly the decade before Bao’s death, 1841–1851. (We don’t know exactly when he left his offi cial career to return home.)

The other main side has an inscription in draft script: Zhangzong xian nongwo, biguan kuai sheng xiang 掌中閒弄握，鼻觀快生香 (I toy with it idly in the palm; exhilarating scents come to the tip of my nose). This is followed by the dedication Wei Yunsan renxiong ti為耘三仁兄題, (Inscribed for Elder Brother Yunsan) and the name 元楳 Yuanmei. Yunsan is unidentifi ed. Yuanmei is a very rare name, avoided perhaps because it was the courtesy name of Zhu Xi 朱熹, the twelfth-century thinker whose infl uence on Confucian thought in East Asia was immense.4 So here again we have three people, Yiqing, Yuanmei, and Yunsan, whose relationship is unknown. Or if one person used any two of those names, we have a relatively simple two-way exchange. About all we can say at this time is that we seem to have another case of multiple creation. (It is possible that Yuanmei copied a drawing Yiqing had made of the garment hook, complete with his signature, for one side of the bottle and added his own couplet and dedication on the other. That would make one artist, one carver/artist, and one dedicatee.)

The remaining “zuo-format” signature bottle, illustrated in figure 11, involves only one name. It also brings us back to bronze inscriptions, as each side reproduces an ancient inscription. We have already noted that the snuff-bottle carvers generally feel free to alter the format of the inscriptions; here, the fi ve-character inscription on the side with the signature is bent into a bow shape utterly unlike the straight column that is seen in the source books. However, this inscription is clearly based on the Sikong yi 司空彝 as presented in Xue Shanggong’s Lidai zhong, ding, yi kuanshi, juan 12. In this case, Ruan Yuan’s 1797 edition (fig. 12) and Lu Liang’s 1719 edition are virtually the same, so we cannot say which one the carver was using. (The 1811 edition of the Xiaotang jigu lu by Wang Qiu is different enough in the last character, yi 彝, to eliminate it as a source; this character, because of its many variations in bronze script, is a useful one for comparing different versions of an inscription.) Interestingly, in the fi rst character, all sources (including Wang Qiu) have a line bisecting the “fi gure eight” in the middle of the

been more interested in making a dynamic pattern that fi lled the round space of the snuff bottle. We can guess that he was reasonably familiar with bronze-inscription characters.

Where he slightly alters the form of a character, he stays within the parameters of known variations.

Shouliang zhuren is among a minority of carvers who uses zuo 作,

Fig. 16a. With seal of Lu Jun.

Fig. 13. Feng Yupeng version of Lu Jiaming bell.

Fig. 16b. Reverse of 16a with seal of Yinchuan.

Fig. 14. 1636 Bogu tulu model for fi g. 13. Fig. 15. 1603 Bogu tulu bell.

10 11

character and joining the two lines on the opposite sides of the “fi gure eight”; and on all the many other vessels on which this character appears in anything resembling this form, that same line is there. The deletion of that line by our carver must be a simple aesthetic decision.

Before discussing the signature on this side of the bottle, let us turn to the odd glyph on the other side. The most likely source for the design is the Jin shi suo 金石索, compiled by Feng Yunpeng 馮雲鵬, 1765–1835 (or 1833), and published in the 1820s.5 The second volume of the Jin shi suo has our glyph, together with a picture of a handled bell (fig. 13).

Jiaming knew Feng and had pre-publication access to his notes, 1813 is too early. Unfortunately, we have not identifi ed Lu Jiaming. Lianfu is probably Lu’s courtesy name (it is not a place name, although it is in a position that could be occupied by a place name), but that hypothesis has not helped to uncover his identity. Given that he shares the surname of Changshu natives Lu Liang and Lu Qi, who were interested enough in bronze inscriptions to publish Xue Shanggong’s work in the fi rst half of the previous century, and given that Feng was from Nantong 南通, across the Yangzi River from Changshu, we may allow ourselves to imagine that he was a Changshu Lu carrying on the clan history of interest in epigraphy, but this is sheer speculation.

The snuff bottle in fi gure 11 offers two other features that can potentially be used to classify and group coconut-shell snuff bottles with ancient inscriptions (or mimicking ancient inscriptions—we shall see examples of that, too). These are the texture of the ground around the characters and the handling of the edge between that ground and the smooth surface of the bottle. Whether or not the original model is a rubbing, most of these bottles tend to evoke that familiar format for the preservation of ancient inscriptions. In making a rubbing, moistened paper is placed over incised characters and tamped down into the depressions in the stone. When the paper is nearly dry, an inked pad is patted fi rmly on the paper: the characters and other low spots in the surface are left white, and of course the paper outside the inked area is white. On the snuff bottles, these white areas are represented by the smooth surface of the characters that are raised against the ground and the smooth areas of the snuff-bottle body outside the ground. Now, the ground has to be carved or chiseled out of the bottle’s surface, which

Feng gives this object the title Zhou liqi duo周立旗鐸 (A Zhou duo bell [decorated with] a standing fl ag) and adds the notation Cong Bogu tu, jianxiao 從博古圖，減小 (following the Bogu tulu, reduced). The reference is probably to the Song-dynasty catalogue Xuanhe Bogu tulu 宣和博古圖錄, which we have already discussed under its shorter title, Bogu tulu. Feng’s model is probably the 1636 edition (fig. 14), for the 1603 edition (fig. 15) shows only an already reduced image—and, interestingly, the glyph there has an extra arc at the bottom. (Xue Shanggong’s version is close to this latter formulation.) In addition, in both editions of the Bogu tulu, the “claw” of the bird is open, not closed as it is on this bottle. Therefore, regardless of his claim to be following the Bogu tulu, Feng Yunpeng’s interpretation of the glyph differs from what we can see in the editions available to us. No matter why Feng departed from his supposed source, we can tell that it is Feng’s version of the glyph that the carver of our bottle has seen and it is Feng’s interpretation of its meaning that he has accepted. On the page shown in fi gure 13, Feng quotes the Bogu tulu: 象鳳栖木之形 (It represents the form of a phoenix perching in a tree), but adds in a

second column, slightly lower, 鵬疑是立旗之形 (I suspect it is the form of a standing fl ag). On the overleaf, Feng gives the dimensions of the bell as reported in the Bogu tulu and then quotes, 銘作鳳栖木形，是器鐸也，周官鼓人以金鐸通鼓，凡樂舞必振鐸以為之。節銘之以鳳亦取皇來儀之象。鵬按：周禮“振鐸作旗”。此疑軍旅所用之鐸，以之作旗，其銘文乃立旗之象也. (The inscription is the form of a phoenix perching in a tree. The offi cial drummer in Zhou times passed information along with a metal bell. For all music and dance, a duo bell was necessary to keep the rhythm. The phoenix also symbolizes the “phoenix coming to display itself” [an auspicious omen]. I would observe that the Rites of Zhou [refers to] “shaking the duo bell and raising the fl ag”; I suspect this is a bell used by the troops, and by its signal they set up the fl ag, so the pattern inscribed on it is the image of erecting a fl ag.) The carver of our bottle, without comment, uses Feng Yunpeng’s title. Although the fi ve-character Sikong yi inscription on the other side indicates that he had access to Xue Shanggong’s compilation of inscriptions, our carver clearly felt free to exercise independent judgment when he encountered a scholarly argument he found more convincing.

Who was this carver? The signature added to the Sikong yi side reads Guiyou zhongqiu Lianfu, Lu Jiaming zuo 癸酉仲秋聯甫陸嘉銘作 (Made by Lu Jiaming, Lianfu, in mid-autumn of the guiyou year). The only defi nite thing we learn from this is the date the bottle was carved. If Feng Yunpeng’s “standing fl ag” interpretation was not published until the 1820s, we are on very fi rm ground in reading the date guiyou as 1873; unless we fi nd evidence that Lu

means that the carver must choose to give it some kind of texture. There are three types of textures in general, although any given bottle may combine the feel of any two of them: a fi ne, irregular roughness like that of an iron tea pot cast in sand; fl at planes chiseled out to create a “palette-knife” effect; and small, raised bumps with varying degrees of “polarization” or orientation. (The ridges of the bumps may be rounder or sharper, as a result of the carver’s touch or of wear.) On the Lu Jiaming bottle (fi g. 11), the side with the “standing fl ag” glyph exhibits the third type, with rather sharp angles where material has been removed and a low-to-medium degree of polarization; the Sikong zuo baoyi side is very similar, but with a much more random orientation of the cuts. On both sides, the border is irregular and curved, with no frame.

At the present state of our knowledge, we cannot rely on these features to tell us where, when, or by whom these bottles were produced, but it is reasonable to expect that they will someday be useful in identifying carvers or workshops. Let us turn now to a bottle (figs. 16a and b) that is similar to the Lu Jiaming bottle in its handling of the bas-relief on the side that features a bronze inscription.

Whatever the signifi cance of its formal qualities, this is a bottle whose inscriptions are rich in information. It serves to introduce

us to Lu Jun 陸均, a carver whose name appears on no

fewer than eight bottles, always with a seal; here (fi g. 16a), the seal reads simply “Lu.” There are two other names on the bottle that help us locate Lu Jun’s career in

the middle of the nineteenth century, for

they possibly belong to a pair of individuals who died in 1861. Finally, a quoted

comment that accompanies the bronze inscription tells us what book the carver drew on for his material.

We shall take up the comment fi rst. The bronze inscription in fi gure 16a reads Zuo bao zun yi, which comes out in standard characters as作寶尊彝 (To make a precious zun vessel). These words are seen on many ancient bronze vessels, usually preceded by the name of the person who caused the vessel to be made. Most interesting for us is the comment that Lu Jun has added to the right on this bottle: “It only takes its inscription from an ancient vessel.” This comment is lifted from an entry in Xue Shanggong’s Lidai zhong, ding, yiqi kuanshi. The full text of the comment in Xue’s book (juan 2) is 右銘云作寶尊彝，與商寶卣相似而字畫不同。形製未傳，但得其款識於古器物耳 (The inscription above says “to make a precious zun vessel”; it resembles [the inscription] on a precious you vessel from the Shang dynasty, but the strokes that make up the characters are different. The actual layout has not been handed down; it only takes its inscription from an ancient vessel).

One can imagine, if one likes, that Lu chose these words from Xue’s commentary to justify altering the layout of an inscription when transferring it to a snuff bottle. The curving format of the inscription on this bottle is an example of precisely such a modifi cation.

Fig. 20. 1719 Xue version of fi g. 19.

Fig. 17. Xue version of fi g. 16a from SKQS.

Fig. 21. By Lu Jin.

Fig. 18. 1719 Xue version of fi g. 16a.

Fig. 19. By Lu Jun.

12 13

Whatever the actual signifi cance of Lu Jun’s choice, knowing that he took his comment from Xue Shanggong’s book is the fi rst step in fi nding his source. The next step is to eliminate editions of Xue’s work as Lu’s model, based on differences between them and the inscription as it appears on the snuff bottle. The Siku quanshu edition of his work (fig. 17) and the 1633 edition (Yin, Zhou jinwen jicheng, no. 05782, not shown but virtually identical to the SKQS version), can be eliminated based on the writing of the characters as well as their layout. This is especially evident in the second character, bao, which is greatly simplifi ed on the bottle. Turning to the 1719 copy made by Lu Liang (fig. 18) and the 1797 edition (not shown; virtually identical to fi g. 18) and checking the character bao shows that this, not the Siku quanshu version or the 1633 version, is our carver’s model. Why there should be such a radical difference in the writing of that character especially is a puzzle beyond the scope of our research; but the fact that the difference exists tells us that Lu Jun was following Xue Shanggong in either the 1719

Shouqing renxiong zheng zhi 陸均為綬青仁兄政之, “Lu Jun made [it]; for the correction of the honorable Shouqing.” Whether Shouqing was addicted to opium (“smoke and mists”) is an open question.

There is also a seal to the left that reads “Yinchuan” 印川; since it appears on no other Lu Jun bottles, we are free to explore the possibility that Yinchuan was a patron who commissioned Lu to carve this bottle, probably for Shouqing. Can we identify these people?

As a given name (ming), Shouqing is almost exclusively a twentieth-century name. However, there was a painter named Tao Shouqing 陶綬青 who died in 1861 during the Taiping Rebellion. A native of Shaoxing, he was known for his prunus paintings. Unfortunately,

that is the extent of our knowledge of him. We don’t know where he died; although 1861 was the year that Shaoxing fell to the Taipings, he may or may not have been in his native place. Artists in the general region moved from place to place as opportunities for markets or patronage presented themselves. We should point out that three of Lu Jun’s extant snuff bottles are decorated with fl owering prunus branches, conceivably inspired by

paintings by Tao Shouqing; but of course there is nothing unusual about this motif on snuff bottles, and coconut-shell bottles by other carvers also feature prunus branches (e.g., fi g. 1).

Yinchuan was the courtesy name of a Changshu bibliophile named Zhang Dingxi 張定璽. What little information we have on Zhang Dingxi’s dates seems contradictory at fi rst glance. According to a study of Changshu book collectors, he lived in the Qianlong era, south of Changshu in Shi Family Bridge 施家橋.6 According to an account of the Taiping Rebellion in the area, however, Zhang was killed in the ninth month of 1861 while trying to lead residents of Shi Family Bridge against the Taipings; the invaders stuck his head on a bamboo pole.7 We can reconcile the two records by noting that, if Zhang was born in the closing years of the Qianlong era, he would have been only in his mid-sixties in 1861, old enough to have the stature for organizing local defenses and young enough to join the fray. Both sources mention the courtesy name Yinchuan, so they must be talking about the same person.

We might note that the writer who recorded the fate of Zhang Dingxi was another bibliophile with the surname Lu, a native of the southern outskirts of Suzhou, and a resident of the adjoining northern area of Jiaxing. This is another indication of the prominence and cultural level of one or more lineages in the region under the name Lu. The graphic similarity between the bibliophile’s name name, Yun 筠, and that of Lu Jun 均 the carver is presumably coincidental, but it could also indicate that they were relatives of the same generation in the same lineage.

A possible scenario for this bottle is that Lu Jun carved it for Yinchuan (Zhang Dingxi) to present to Tao Shouqing. Since Zhang and Tao both died in 1861 at the hands of the Taiping rebels, and Tao could have been in Changshu at the time, we may extrapolate that the bottle was carved in or near Changshu sometime in the months or years leading up to the fall of the city.

Another bottle signed by Lu Jun is shown in figure 19. One side has a couplet in seven-word lines, but the signature is on the side

with the bronze inscription, which is based on the 1719 Lu Liang copy of Xue Shanggong’s Lidai Zhong ding yi qi kuanshi (fig. 20; pp. 22–23 in the 1985 reprint) or on the 1797 edition—again, there is no signifi cant difference between the two. Lu Jun does not transcribe the inscription in standard characters, but he does quote the fi rst half of Xue’s comment, which speculates that the fi rst character is the name of the maker of the vessel.

Lu also uses a token seal: yin 印 (seal). He and one other carver (to be discussed below) are the only ones who use this token seal, though it is familiar to snuff-bottle collectors from inside-painted bottles, where it appears quite frequently. A second bottle signed by Lu Jun and featuring the token yin seal is shown in figure 21. (Its decoration is not relevant to our focus on archaic-style inscriptions, so we shall note merely that the bottle is dedicated to someone with such a commonly used courtesy name that it provides no basis for identifying him.)

The third Lu Jun bottle with a token seal brings us back to the

or the 1797 edition. On the opposite side of this bottle

(fi g. 16b), we have seven characters engraved in the style of regular-script characters that was used for monumental inscriptions in the northern part of medieval China. They read Wei jun liaoque yanxia yin 為君療卻煙霞癮 (This will cure you of your addiction to “smoke and mist”). Below that, in regular-script characters, we have Lu Jun wei

Fig. 22. By Lu Jin.

Fig. 30. By Lu Jin.

Fig. 25. Bloch Collection, no. 1489. Fig. 31b. Reverse of 31a. By Lu Jin.

Fig. 27. 1797 Xue version of fi g. 25.

Fig. 31a. By Lu Jin.

Fig. 26. 1719 Xue version of fi g. 25.

Fig. 23. 1719 Xue version of fi g. 22.

Fig. 28. Xue version of fi g. 25, SKQS.

Fig. 24. 1797 Xue version of fi g. 22.

Fig. 29. 1811 Wang Qui version of fi g. 25.

14 15

indication that the carver of all three bottles was using the 1797 edition.

The existence of two more bottles as “completed” versions of the Bloch bottle gives us startling evidence that Lu Jun either made several bottles with identical bronze-vessel inscriptions, set them aside, and then added inscriptions appropriate to some specifi c occasion, or made them from scratch as the occasion required, but still with the identical bronze-vessel inscriptions. The bottle in figure 30 is almost a perfect duplicate of the Bloch bottle. It bears the signature of Lu Jun with what is probably the token seal yin (it is hard to see in the photograph). It also has a dedication to someone named Rongfu 蓉甫. Rongfu is a name used by several individuals, none of whom we can convincingly associate with this bottle.

The other inscribed version of the Bloch bottle is slightly different in shape (fig. 31a), as well as in the content of the added inscriptions. Below Lu Jun’s signature, which in this case is on the opposite side from the bronze inscription, is a seal, “Jun” 均 (fig. 31).9 The accompanying inscription reads 似煙非煙，得味非味。信手拈來，我與爾相聯一氣 (It seems to be smoke/tobacco, but it is not; one gets its fl avor, but it is not a fl avor [one can literally taste]. One picks it up without thinking, and I and you are joined as one breath). This seems to be about snuff and the snuff bottle’s intimate connection with its owner. Of more historical interest is the dedication, which is to someone named Xunzhai zhuren 遜齋主人, the Master of the Studio of Escape. We have not found anyone who used

exactly this name, but Xuzhai by itself was used fairly commonly as a name, courtesy name, or sobriquet. The one person we have found using the name Xunzhai who was most likely to have been an acquaintance of Lu Jun is Sun Yi’an 孫衣言 (1814–1894, courtesy name Qinxi 琴西). Sun was an avid collector of rare books and held offi ce in areas not far from where we think Lu Jun was active. In 1872, he was assigned to the salt administration for Jiangsu in Nanjing; later in the same year, he was made a surveillance commissioner in Anhui. Sun retired in 1877 and returned to his native Rui’an 瑞安, south of Wenzhou on the coast of Zhejiang, where he built a library that has survived to the present day. If we assume that Lu Jun and Sun Yi’an are

world of bronze inscriptions (fig. 22; on the side not shown, there are prunus branches). It is in the Marakovic Collection. Here again, we fi nd an irregular border around the inscription and a ground carved with a medium-rough, angular texture with little polarization. On the bottle in fi gure 19, the engraved and carved areas are fi lled with a gold pigment; here, too, there are traces of gold.

In the case of the archaic inscription on the Marakovic bottle, we fi nd that the 1719 Lu Liang edition of Xue Shanggong’s book and the 1797 Ruan Yuan edition are slightly different (figs. 23 and 24, respectively). The four characters, which are transcribed and interpreted by Xue as Bo zuo baoyi 伯作寶彝, are extremely common, occurring on a variety of bronze vessels and, for some reason, even on Yixing teapots.8 However, the distinctive writing of the last character, yi, distinguishes both the bottle and the 1797 edition from all other versions, including, this time, the 1719 edition.

Interestingly, when Lu Jun quotes the fi rst line in Xue Shanggong’s comment, 桉古器以伯為銘者多矣 “We observe that on ancient vessels, a great many have inscriptions by a

bo,” he makes one change. He substitutes ming 名 (name) for ming 銘 (to inscribe; inscription): “We observe that on ancient vessels, a great many have Bo as a name.” This could have been a homophone error, but it could also indicate that Lu Jun felt entitled to exercise editorial judgment, consciously correcting Xue.

The Marakovic bottle is dedicated to a Yan’geng 研耕. There are many men (and at least one woman) who used the name Yan’geng in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are unable to connect any of them with Lu Jun at this time.

A remarkable discovery that came out of our research is the existence of three coconut-shell snuff bottles that bear copies of the same archaic inscription. Two of them are signed by Lu Jun, give a title to the inscription, and have dedications. The remaining one is unsigned, untitled, and bears no text other than the copy of the archaic inscription. This is no. 1489 in the Bloch Collection (fig. 25); it has peach leaves on one side and traces of gilding remaining in the low spots of the ground around the characters of the inscription. The inscription is a delightful design that seemed impossible to interpret as characters

when we fi rst studied it (still unaware of the existence of the two signed versions of the bottle, which give the title). Once we realized that it was indeed a bronze-vessel inscription, we were able to determine that it clearly comes from either the 1719 edition of Xue Shanggong’s work (fig. 26) or the 1797 edition (fig. 27). The versions in the Siku quanshu edition (fig. 28) and the 1811 edition of the Xiaotang jigu lu by Wang Qiu (fig. 29) are not the model; only the 1719 and 1797 editions have a “fl eshed-out” version of the characters; the others are more like schematic sketches.

The representations of the inscription in the 1719 and 1797 editions of Xue Shanggong appear virtually identical, but the two editions give different titles to the

inscription. The former (fi g. 26) calls it a Bing dingi 秉鼎; the latter (fi g. 27) a Bingzhong ding 秉仲鼎. Bingzhong ding is probably correct insofar as it includes both decipherable characters in the center of the

design, bing and zhong. (The two “ears” at the left and right are still

the subject of debate.) The two other versions of the Bloch bottle provide the title in the three-character form: Bingzhong ding. That is a strong

Fig. 33. Zhenting seal. Bloch Collection no. 1488; sold by Bonhams Hong Kong, May 25, 2011, lot 45.

Fig. 34b. Dated side of 34a.Fig. 34a. By Youshan and Lu Jun.Fig. 32a. By Lu Jun. Fig. 32b. Reverse of 32a, Zhenting

seals.

16 17

unlikely to have met after the latter’s retirement, this bottle is most likely to have been carved before 1877. Our other speculations about the dates of Lu’s bottles place them in the 1860s, so this is a reasonable supposition. On the other hand, it was not until 1889, one year after Sun built his library, that a Suzhou scholar, offi cial, and calligrapher named Pan Zuyin 潘祖蔭 wrote a placard for it. This tells us that Sun was still known and well regarded in Suzhou long after his retirement. In fact, it may have been the interest in epigraphy that he shared with collectors in the Suzhou area that provided the occasion for continued correspondence. Pan Zuyin was just such a collector: he will appear later in our essay as the owner of a bronze vessel whose inscription appears on another coconut-shell bottle. And as for Sun Yi’an, he was more than a book collector; in 1877, he wrote the preface to a work on coinage by Ni Mo 倪模 (1750–1825), which tells us that he had an interest in characters on ancient artifacts. In other words, he was someone who would have appreciated the kind of snuff bottle Lu Jun carved.

The importance of the bottle carved for the unidentifi ed Rongfu and of the bottle carved for the possibly identifi ed Xunzhai zhuren

lies in the fact that they and the Bloch bottle with no dedication or signature offer unique evidence for the practice of making multiple copies of a given coconut-shell snuff bottle design and personalizing them as the occasion arose. Inside-painting artists made some bottles with inscriptions and some without, but this practice has been hitherto unnoticed with coconut-shell snuff bottles. Collectors, dealers, and scholars should be on the alert for other examples.

There is another Lu Jun bottle with a rather different kind of inscription (fig. 32a). It is in bas-relief on a square, frameless ground (as opposed to the irregular, curving borders of the bottles we have been examining), although the ground is roughened with the angular, non-polarized cuts of the other Lu Jun works. The inscription is repeated on the other main side in regular script, preceded by Kuiqing sanxiong yawan 逵青三兄雅玩, “For the pure enjoyment of third elder brother Kuiqing” and followed by the signature Lu Jun and the seals Zhen and ting 榛亭 (fig. 32b). This inscription is not from an ancient bronze, although it is presented as if it were; it is in seal characters, which are distinct from bronze-inscription

characters to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the character. The text comes from a “Biography of a Fisherman” in the Nanshi 南史 (History of the southern dynasties), which covers the period 420–589 and was presented to the throne in 659. It is the song of a fi sherman who explains to a local offi cial why he does not come out of reclusion to serve, even though the age is supposedly an enlightened one.

The relevance of this bottle to our present inquiry turns on the question of whether it tells us anything about Lu Jun. The dedication to Kuiqing does suggest an intriguing alternative picture of who Lu Jun was and where he lived, although we think it is a red herring. In 1870, the court included a Beijing native named Lu Jun in a list of men who would have temples erected in their names. In the Da Qing huidian shili 大清會典事例 (Supplementary precedents and regulations to the collected statutes of the Great Qing), juan 454, we fi nd out why: Lu is identifi ed as the xian magistrate of Anding xian 安定縣 in Gansu province, which was attacked by Muslim insurgents in the second month of 1870. According to the Xu Shaanxi tongzhi gao 續陝西通志稿 (Draft continuation of the comprehensive gazetteer of Shaanxi,

1934), Lu Jun had been sent out to a variety of posts in the northwestern areas of the empire in the Daoguang era, fi nally ending up in Anding. On the second day of the second month, when the Muslim rebels overran the county seat, Lu was captured. He continued to curse the rebels, so they tied him to a tree outside the city wall, cut off his tongue, cut away his cheeks, shot a hole in his chest, and, after he expired, dismembered his body.

Kuiqing was the courtesy name of a successful jinshi candidate from Tianjin in 1811 named Wang Fengzhu王鳳翥. This name appears occasionally in other nineteenth-century records, but without the courtesy name or any other information that would tell us that it was the same person, so we can say nothing defi nite about his career. But on the basis of chronology and geography alone, it is possible for the Lu Jun who was killed so gruesomely in 1870 to have carved this snuff bottle for the Wang Fengzhu from Tianjin, so close to Beijing. Although we do not know how old Lu was when he died, he must have been living in Beijing as an adult long enough to amass some experience before he was sent out to Shaanxi, so Wang could have been a senior acquaintance of his in the capital. In favor of this scenario is the fact that there are quite a few names on coconut-shell snuff bottles (albeit with other types of decoration, not bronze inscriptions) that can be tied to people whose spheres of activity included northern China. Arguing against it is the fact that none of those identifi cations is secure at this stage in our research. And, although we lack direct evidence, all indications we have seen so far are that the Lu Jun who carved snuff bottles from coconut shells was from the Changshu area. The Lu Jun from Beijing is not known to have spent time in the south, so they must be two different individuals. We don’t

necessarily have to reject our identifi cation of Kuiqing as Wang Fengzhu, however, for we don’t know enough about him to assert that he could nor could not have known either Lu Jun.

The seals on the bottle for Kuiqing present another puzzle. The zhen seal is somewhat abbreviated, but by comparing it with a Zhenting seal on an unsigned bottle that recently left the Bloch Collection (fig. 33; Bonham’s Hong Kong, 25 May 2011, lot 45), we can be fairly confi dent that we are reading it correctly. That this seal can be associated with Lu

Jun is suggested by the fact that a seal that appears to read zhen is also found on a bottle in the Humphrey Hui Collection signed by Lu (fig. 34a). The seal there is on the right side of a bronze inscription and follows a dedication to someone known as Jingxuan: Jingxuan renxiong zheng zhi, Lu Jun you zuo 靜軒仁兄正之/陸均又作 (For the corrections of Elder Brother Jingxuan, made again by Lu Jun).

The Hui bottle offers a great deal of information—if only we knew how to interpret it. To begin with, the word again in Lu Jun’s dedication is unusual. Perhaps it indicates that the other side of the bottle was carved fi rst, and some interval had passed before Lu carved this side. Indeed, there does seem to be a difference in wear on the two sides. However, despite the evidence for multiple “artist-ship” we presented above, we have yet to see any examples of coconut-shell snuff bottles with only one side carved, as one would expect if it were common to leave one side untouched for a later date. Therefore, the explanation for the word again might instead be that that both sides were carved originally, and Lu Jun came along later and reworked one side.

Jingxuan, to whom Lu dedicated his work, is diffi cult to identify. Numerous people used the name Jingxuan. We know a great deal about some of them, but not enough about any of them to link them with Lu Jun. One is worth mentioning because he was from Changshu and lived in the mid-nineteenth century, when Lu Jun appears to have been carving snuff bottles. His name was

Mei Sanguan 梅三官, and an account of Changshu in the

Taiping Rebellion reports that he was captured by the Taipings and taken to Wuxi when Changshu fell. He was able to return only after Wuxi and

Changshu were recovered (in December

1863 and May 1864, respectively).10

Fig. 37. 1791 Xue version of fi g. 34b.

Fig. 35. Signed Yue’an.

Fig. 38. Ruan Yuan version of fi g. 34a.Fig. 36. 1633 Xue version of fi g. 34b.

18 19

The name that appears on the same side of the bottle (fi g. 34a, again) but on the left side of the bronze-vessel inscription links this bottle to three other bottles bearing the same name. That name is Youshan 有山.

Youshan was the courtesy name of very few people, as far as we can tell. We think that here it belongs to Pan Yi’ao 潘奕鏊 (1740–1830), from Suzhou. In addition to the four bottles signed by Youshan, there is one bottle with his seal; all the signed bottles, interestingly, have the verb kan 刊 (cut or carve) after the name; very few carvers append this verb after his their names. Pan Yi’ao’s cousin, Pan Yijun 潘奕雋, used the verb zhi 製 (make) after his sobriquet on another snuff bottle, as we shall see. These are the almost only cases we know of where a coconut-shell snuff-bottle carver adds any verb to his signature, the exceptions being the zuo-format signatures in fi gures 2, 8, 9, 10, and 11; the Lu Jun signature on the Hui bottle under discussion; the bottle illustrated in figure 35, which has Yue’an ke, 月庵刻, ke being the equivalent of kan (and Yue’an being unidentifi ed, so far); and the bottle by Weipiaoan zhu 味瓢盦主, illustrated in fi gure 59.11

We suspect that Youshan/Pan Yi’ao is both the original carver of the side recarved by Lu Jun (fi g. 34a) and the carver of the other side (fi g.

was working from a drawing someone had made from a book (it is highly unlikely that the original vessel was extant) without writing down the transcription or the comments.

This notion is supported by the odd fact that the next three characters, 其寶鬲, are reduced in his copy of the inscription to what looks like the two characters 寶 and鬲 (the 寶 is rather incoherent). The reduction probably refl ects a bad or damaged sketch. In Youshan’s transcription on the bottle, these three characters are omitted altogether; he probably was unable to decipher them. (He also leaves out the doubled 子 and 孫, “sons and grandsons,” in both the text and the transcription, but that does not affect the sense of the text. His decision was undoubtedly a conscious one driven by the limited space available.) Working from a photo, it is diffi cult to read his worn colophon that says how many characters there are, but if it says fi fteen, that would include single “sons and grandsons” in the carver’s count and not include the missing 其—further evidence that he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at.

The inscription on the side including Youshan’s signature and Lu Jun’s additional colophon (fi g. 34a) does not exhibit any of these issues; it is correctly identifi ed and carved. Whereas the other inscription converted the circular format of the original vessel (as refl ected in the source books we have examined) into columns of characters, this one preserves the column format that is found in the source texts. That in itself is not necessarily signifi cant, as it seems to have been a general practice to alter the format of inscriptions to create the most dynamic design within the space afforded by the bottle, but we must note that the carver here was quite meticulous in following the model as given in Ruan Yuan’s Jiguzhai zhong, ding, yiqi kuanshi 積古齋鐘鼎彝器款識 (completed in 1794 and printed by Ruan in 1804).12 Ruan’s version has fi ve characters in the fi rst column (父 and 癸 are run together and look like one character; this is fairly common with this type of name in bronze inscriptions) and three in the second, just as on this bottle (fig. 38). The carver and Ruan also give the same title to the inscription. There is only one other pre-twentieth-century reproduction of this rubbing; it is essentially the

same, and in any case it was not published until 1895.13

If our speculation that Lu Jun recarved this side of the bottle (except for Youshan’s signature) is correct, it would seem that he had better sources and more familiarity with bronze inscriptions than Youshan, who stumbled so badly on the side dated jisi (1809).

Youshan used a frameless, curving or jagged border on the dated side (fi g. 34b); the ground behind the inscription is worn smooth (indicating that this side is older), but might be more of the “sand-casting” texture than we have seen with Lu. On the side with the inscription copied from Ruan Yuan’s book, the ground is somewhere between the two styles, but the most salient feature is the frame. It is like a woody vine bent into a rectangular frame all around the inscription. This is unique in the bottles we have studied for this article; whether or not the border is designed to disguise the alterations we think Lu made is impossible to say without inspecting the bottle closely and in person.

Another bottle signed by Youshan also shows evidence of having come from Ruan Yuan’s book, even though it is not a very

34b). We shall return to Lu Jun’s side after pointing out some puzzling problems with that other side. The colophon there gives the text of the bronze inscription in standard characters, states that altogether there are fi fteen characters (see below), and then gives the cyclical date jisi 己巳 (which would correspond to 1809 if Pan is the artist) and “autumn.” There is no name or dedication.

Neither the inscription itself nor the transliteration in standard characters follows accurately any version of a known model. There is a somewhat similar version in the 1633 edition of Xue Shanggong (fig. 36; Yin, Zhou jinwen jicheng no. 710), and based on the image of it shown here there was no transliteration into standard characters to guide our carver, but if he had been following this model it is hard to see how he could have distorted and run together some of the characters in the manner we shall describe in the next paragraph.

The full transliteration of the inscription as written within the circular original in Ruan Yuan’s 1797 edition of Xue is 仲斯大它鑄其寶鬲其萬年子子孫孫永寶用 (figs. 37a and b). The bottle follows that version in interpreting the second

character as si 斯. This is not problematical; the more recent consensus is that this character should be interpreted as having 力 on the right side, not 斤, but we are interested in what the carvers were looking at, not at the philological correctness of their published sources. More interesting is that the carver’s transliteration of the fourth character, which should be 它, is 心 and that he is unable to come up with a standard equivalent for the next character, 鑄, so he more or less copies the original character as it looks. The fi rst mistake is understandable, since the archaic form of 它 reminds one of the seal form of 心. The treatment of 鑄 is in line with standard practice: when scholars transliterate an archaic character they cannot read, they simply write it as it would look if its various elements were converted into more modern forms. The importance of these two details lies in the fact that they tell us that the carver was not looking at any version of the text with the transcription provided for him: he was on his own in fi guring it out. This is puzzling, because all of the likely source books for original inscriptions that we are aware of provide transliterations into standard characters. Perhaps, then, Youshan

Fig. 39. By Youshan.

Fig. 41. Tile-end Youshan bottle.

Fig. 40. Ruan Yuan version of fi g. 39. Fig. 42. Source (r.) of fi g. 41, 1787-1794.

Fig. 43a. Shows Youshan seal. Bloch Collection no. 1487; sold by Bonhams Hong Kong, May 28, 2010, lot 16.

Fig. 43c. Detail of 43b.

Fig. 43b. Reverse of 43a.

20 21

pool of bronze-inscription coconut-shell snuff bottles.

We should be able to pass over quickly another bottle Youshan carved, a bottle with one side devoted to a famous quatrain by the Tang poet Jia Dao in seal characters and the other to a Han-dynasty tile end with the four characters Chang sheng wei yang 長生未央 (Long life never ending; fig. 41). After all, there are hundreds of those tile ends and rubbings from them in existence, with more being dug up every day, so it should be close to impossible to identify Youshan’s model. In fact, however, the volume of published examples in the mid-Qing was much lower, and the format of this tile is somewhat special, making it easy to identify.

The majority of tile ends with this inscription are read top to bottom in two columns: upper right, lower right, upper left, lower left. The tile end represented on this snuff bottle, however, belongs to the minority that are read clockwise (upper right, lower right, lower left, upper left), with the characters rotating so their left sides are always oriented to the center of the design. The difference is readily apparent in the book we think was Youshan’s source (fig. 42): the example on the left has the more common format; that on the right, the less common. (There are other formats, as well.) Youshan’s snuff bottle follows the example on the right not only in the orientation and

person’s name after the Ming have prompted us to reattribute this work to the Youshan 有山 under discussion.17

The inscription on the side with the Youshan seal celebrates snuff; it is not an ancient inscription. It is written in seal characters, although the format is a beautifully executed example of the curved, frameless border and rough-textured ground that we have come to associate with bronze-script inscriptions on coconut-shell bottles. The text is composed of collected lines from the “Monthly Orders” chapter of the Li Ji 禮記, the Book of Rites, an early anthology of ritual texts. The inscription reads 其味酸，其臭香，其气疏以達 (Its taste is sour, its smell is fragrant, its breath is light [to resemble] the shooting forth [of plants]). Two characters are different from the original text, which reads (in the translation of James Legge; the interpolations, which we carried over into our translation above, are his), “Its taste is sour…its smell is rank….the vessels [which he uses] are lightly carved [to resemble] the shooting forth [of plants]”. It would seem that Youshan has deliberately altered the text to match similar sentences in various medical texts, but undoubtedly for the purpose of describing snuff.

The other side (fig. 43b) looks like a bronze inscription, complete with transliteration into standard characters (detail, fig. 43c).

placement of the characters, but also in the elongation

of some of the elements of the characters.

We have not seen other models that come close to this one as a likely source.

The rubbing in fi gure 42 is in Qin Han

wadang wenzi 秦漢瓦當文字 (Patterns and

characters on Qin and Han

tile ends), published in 1787

(with a continuation in 1794).16 The author is Cheng Dun 程敦, a native of She xian 歙縣, in Anhui; he included rubbings from friends who shared his passion for collecting archeological remains from the Xi’an area, so it can be considered a comprehensive collection of known tile ends at the end of the century. Pan Yi’ao (Youshan) was early enough to have seen this book soon after its publication (before it became a rare book hidden away in the collections of wealthy collectors). It is interesting that this is the fi rst Youshan bottle we have seen that faithfully reproduces its model. Perhaps this is because he had direct access to the book; or it could be that the content of the model (four common characters in a conventional auspicious phrase reproduced on thousands of tile ends, of which Pan Yi’ao may have seen many tens) is far less arcane than bronze inscriptions from earlier centuries.

The only snuff bottle on which Pan Yi’ao used a seal instead of appending his name is one that was until recently no. 1487 in the Bloch Collection (Bonham’s Hong Kong, 28 May 2010, lot 16; fig. 43a). While the bottle was with the Blochs, the seal was thought to represent a different name, Youshan 右山 (the two names are distinguished by the tone of the fi rst syllable as well as by their writing), but reconsideration of the fi rst character and the fact that Youshan 右山 is unknown as a

exact copy (see figs. 39 and 40).14 The character on the right, jin金, has been revised to include more dots, for example. The three dots that Ruan shows on the right side of the left-hand character (tang 湯, but, according to Ruan, an abbreviated form of dang 璗) have been moved to the left side. The title on the snuff bottle, “Bronze vessel inscription,” is different from Ruan’s title, “Han-dynasty Tangjin bronze vessel,” although it is taken from the fi rst line of his commentary: “To the right is a Han-dynasty Tangjin bronze-vessel inscription.” The comment on the bottle is slightly different, as well. Where Ruan says, Tang zi fan xie湯字

反寫 (The character tang is written backwards), the bottle says, Tang, jin er zi fan wen 湯金二字反文 (The two characters tang and jin are reversed characters).

An obvious way to explain these inconsistencies is to say that the carver was following a different model. Unfortunately, we have been unable to fi nd the model. Ruan’s entry was discussed by other scholars in the early and late nineteenth century, and it became clear to them that more than one object was fl oating around bearing the same two characters or similar characters. No comment by them matches the one on this snuff bottle, however.15

Here again, it would be possible to say that Youshan was working from someone else’s description of an inscription. That would explain why he felt he had the freedom to dress it up a little, perhaps even to “correct” the original inscription by moving the three dots of tang. It remains to observe that the border around the inscription is asymmetrical and curved to fi t the contours of the characters; the ground is distinguishable from most of the Lu Jun textures only in being slightly less angular in the chisel cuts. The other side of the bottle is devoted to an auspicious cicada design, the only such example in our

Fig. 45a. By Pan Yijun.

Fig. 46. Ruan Yuan version of fi g. 45a.

Fig. 45b. Reverse of 45a. By Pan Yijun.

Fig. 44. Youshan “collected-lines” bottle.

Fig. 47. Actual source for fi g. 45a.

22 23

However, the fi rst character is in seal form, the second character is missing a stroke, and we have been unable to fi nd an inscription that matches this text. There is a Huiji li 慧季鬲, but its inscription is only three characters long, and the fi rst character there is not at all like the one we see here. Our conclusion for the present is that this is a pseudo-inscription, although it is a mystery to us why it would be necessary to make up an inscription (and even provide standard characters for it, which we don’t see Youshan do elsewhere). This could be another case of Youshan getting his material from another person in somewhat garbled form, but if so, we are unable in this instance to make a guess as to the original’s real content.

The artistry of this mystery inscription is masterful; the ground has a rather polarized texture, avoiding a mere repetition of the ground on the other side, which from a distance has more of the sand-cast feel. The shape of the “rubbing” area and the less-regular arrangement of the characters in the pseudo-inscription also serve as a counterpoint to regularity of the side with the adaption of lines from the Li ji.

The remaining Youshan bottle (fig. 44) also does not, strictly speaking, fall into the category of bronze-inscription bottles, for neither

side carries such an inscription. The side with the dedication has the look of a bronze inscription, but the text is actually the same lines adapted from the Li ji as the bottle we have just discussed; they are merely arranged in a less symmetrical composition on an asymmetrical ground with a vertically oriented texture to the ground. There is a colophon to the left explaining that these are “collected lines” from the Monthly Orders (but it is silent on the alterations). Then there is a dedication to someone named Songfu 嵩甫, a name used by at least four or fi ve identifi able people. If Youshan is Pan Yi’ao, a Suzhou painter who lived from 1740 to 1830, then this Songfu could be Xu Shan 許善, a Yangzhou painter mentioned in works by Yuan Mei 袁枚 (d. 1797) and Li Dou 李斗 (d. 1817) and therefore someone Pan might address as xiansheng 先生, a title of respect with many meanings, including “teacher,” “master,” and so forth, but implying some kind of seniority. Some sources write his courtesy name Songpu 松圃, but there would be nothing unusual about his using both names, serially or simultaneously. An alternative Songfu candidate is Zhang Kezhen 張克振 (1763–1824); he was twenty years younger than

Pan Yi’ao, but he was a scholar and, eventually, an offi cial.

The other side of the bottle, with “Youshan kan” and the date (jisi, the same date as the Youshan – Lu Jun bottle discussed above; fi gs. 34a–b), is also decorated with “collected lines,” although this time the lines are from poems. Putting old lines of poetry together in new combinations was a common practice in China. The fi rst line is the seventh line of a poem by Hu Su 胡宿, a little-known tenth-century poet: 愁將玉笛傳遺恨 “In sorrow I convey my lingering regrets on a jade fl ute”. The second line is the fi rst line of a poem on the prunus by the famous painter Wang Mian 王冕 (1300–1359): 不向羅浮問醉仙 “I do not ask at Luofu Mountain about the drunken immortals”.We have not yet found an example of these two lines being joined into one couplet previously, although Hu Su’s line does appear in some other “collected lines” poems and in at least one such poem within a play by Ji Yongren 嵇永仁 (1637–1676), “Yangzhou Dream,” so the carver could have taken it from any of a number of sources.

Let us turn to Pan Yijun, Pan Yi’ao’s cousin, whose name has already come up several times in our discussion. He carved the bottle in figures 45a and b, which is decorated with a bronze inscription that Ruan Yuan, who owned a vessel with a similar inscription, called the Liu jun gui 留君簋; it is now called the Fan jun shao gui 番君召簋. This is one of the few examples where the inscription is engraved into the surface of the bottle rather than being carved in bas-relief, but the important

thing for us here is that the other side of the bottle is entirely

devoted to the notice that the bottle was made by Sansong jushi 三松居士 (Retired scholar of the three pines). That was a name used by Pan Yijun.

Pan was a dedicated bibliophile in the

“honorable” Suzhou Pan lineage (as opposed to the “rich”

Suzhou Pan lineage, which had been in Suzhou longer and devoted

itself to business more than scholarship). It is probably signifi cant that one of his closest friends was Huang Peilie 黃丕烈 (1763–1825), a Suzhou collector of rare editions. Pan Yijun spent a lot of time with Huang and his collection. It could have been through him that Pan Yi’ao (Youshan) got the reports and sketches of bronze inscriptions that he used for his snuff bottles. Arguing against that scenario is the poor quality of the materials that went to Youshan (or his poor use of them).18

Pan Yijun or Huang Peilieh may have owned the rubbing that is the model for the inscription on this bottle. We mentioned that Ruan Yuan owned a vessel inscribed with this text, but a glance at his copy of the inscription (fig. 46) shows that it is not the source for our bottle. It is less complete, for one thing, with characters at the bottom of the last two columns missing. Interestingly, there are fi ve other versions of this same inscription (Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng, nos. 04583 –87), each slightly different from the other, and all differing from the inscription on the bottle by including the direct object zhi 之 at the end of the inscription (“use it”). The single inscription that matches this bottle is Yin Zhou jinwen jicheng, no. 04582 (fig. 47). The character at the bottom of the second column on the bottle is a little different in its lower element, but it may have been damaged and recarved. Now, this image comes from a rubbing that was held by Chen Chengxiu 陳承修, an early Republican high offi cial from Fujian. (His courtesy name, Huaisheng 淮生, can be seen in the seal on the rubbing in fi g. 47.) We don’t know where Chen Chengxiu got this rubbing, but the existence of this close copy of it on the snuff bottle at issue and the fact that the bottle is signed by Pan Yijun make it very likely that it came (through intermediate owners) from Huang Peilie or Pan Yijun.

We have now examined all the known bottles signed by Lu Jun and Youshan. These account for all the coconut-shell snuff bottles with bronze-inscription designs (or carved

decorations that imitate such designs) that are extant in multiple exemplars for a single carver. For all other carvers, we have only single examples. Looking at the Hui Collection bottle that bears the signatures of both Youshan and Lu Jun, the seal Zhen, and Lu Jun’s dedication to Jingxuan, we noticed that Lu Jun seemed to be retouching and recycling an older, worn bottle carved by Youshan. If the date on Youshan’s colophon corresponds to 1809, this bottle supports our theory, based on the evidence of Lu Jun’s other bottles, that Lu was active about a half-century later. Comparing Lu Jun’s

inscriptions with their published source images, we are confi dent that he was using the 1797 edition of Xue Shanggong’s book. There is a strong possibility that other names on Lu Jun bottles belonged to people from the Changshu – Changzhou – Suzhou area. If Youshan was Pan Yi’ao, he was from the same area. Some puzzling features of Youshan’s bronze-inscription designs suggest that he was working only indirectly from published inscriptions.

24 25

NOTES

1 The inscription is a duilian, an “antithetical” (or grammatically parallel) couplet. In all cases it seems to express a general sentiment of vast temporal and spatial extension. Here, it reads真石經萬載、輕騎歷八荒 , “A true stone lasts ten thousand years; a swift cavalryman passes through the farthest reaches in all directions”; a version seen on modern scrolls is 貞石經萬載、輕輿歷八荒, “an unyielding stone [i.e., a stele] lasts ten thousand years; a swift cart passes through the farthest reaches in all directions.” The substitution of yu, “cart,” for ji, “cavalryman,” seems trivial; 貞石 zhenshi (unyielding stone; stele), on the other hand, seems preferable to zhenshi 真石, which appears to have no particular cultural resonance and is probably a homophone error.

2 The prominent late-Qing scholar Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 (1830–1904) wrote a poem in 1902 with the title 寫經冊有祖觀題字，祖觀號覺阿，吳中詩僧也，道光辛丑，余曾見之 “In a handwritten sutra there was a colophon by Zuguan; Zuguan’s sobriquet was Jue’a, and he was a monk-poet in Wu [Suzhou]. I once met him, in 1841.”

3 Qing shilu 清實錄, juan 97, Daoguang 6.4.

4 A Qing figure who did use Yuanmei is Huang Kuibai 黃魁百 (1687–1763), but he is too early for this type of bottle.

5 Feng’s preface to the Jin shi suo is dated 1822. The title page in the copy held by Stanford University says the blocks for the book were first carved (kaijuan開鐫) in 1821, but there are prefaces dated as late as 1824. Some sources say Feng produced the work with his brother Feng Yunyuan 馮雲鵷 (1811 jinshi) while teaching at the Changping Academy 昌平書院 in Qufu, Shandong, in 1826.

6 Xu Yan 徐雁 and Wang Yanjun 王雁均, eds., Zhongguo lishi cangshu lunzhu duben 中國歷史藏書論著讀本, Chengdu: Sichuan University, 1990, p. 722.

7 Ke Wuchi 柯悟遲, Lu Yun 陸筠, Louwang yong yu ji, haijiao xubian 漏網喁魚集、海角續編, 1868; Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959 p. 124.

8 To which we may add the Yixing snuff bottle in figure 1 of Moss and Sargent, “The World in a Bottle in the World at the end of the Qing Empire,” JICSBS, Winter 2010, p. 5. The maker of that snuff bottle died in 1822.

9 The bottle is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a gift from Eugenia Fuller Atwood in 1977; we thank the museum for providing these images and permission to use them.

10 Ke Wuchi, op cit., 96. 11 There is also a bottle from the

Fernhill Park Collection on which the signature appears to be followed by kan. We are unable to see the signature clearly in the photograph available to us, and there may be more information on the side for which we have no image, but we can see that the bottle is dated bingzi 丙子, which could be equivalent to 1816. The source for the three-character archaic inscription, which is given the title Gong ge ming 公戈銘 but not transcribed in standard characters on the bottle, remains unknown.

12 The original draft survived and was published in lithographic form in 1906.

13 Wu Shifen 吳式芬 (1797–1856), Jungu lu 古錄, in vol. 902 of Xuxiu Siku quanshu 續修四庫全書，2.1.23a ( p. 523).

14 In addition to the 1804 edition Ruan published, he reprinted it in a collectanea called the Wenxuanlou congshu 文選樓叢書, produced in the 1840s. This edition was reproduced in the Congshu jicheng collectanea in 1937; that is the version in figure 40.

15 Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 (1905–2003), in his Beishan tanyilu 北山談藝錄 (2001), p. 76, points out that the comment made by others that both characters are reversed is somewhat problematic, since jin 金 looks the same when reversed. He also reproduces a rubbing of a shell-shaped box with the inscription in question (p. 77). It is very close to what Ruan Yuan shows, and the paper bears a seal of Ruan Yuan, but Ruan clearly came into possession of the rubbing after his book was published, for he states in the book that he took this inscription from another, earlier work.

16 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL: 4910127?n=29, Accessed 26 August 2012.

17 The lower element of 右 is never tipped over on its side in seal or bronze script, as it is here. The character in the seal appears to have one less stroke than normal for 有 in seal script, but the abbreviated form is attested in bronze script.

18 For the family and for a portrait of Pan Yijun, see Wang Renyu 王仁宇, Suzhou mingren guju 蘇州名人故居 [Former residences of the famous people of Suzhou], Xi’an: Xi’an chubanshe, 2001, pp. 40–42. The fact that they share one syllable of their given names indicates that Yijun and Yi’ao were clansmen of the same generation, but they were not, in this case, brothers—Yijun’s brothers were named Yizao 奕藻 and Yiji 奕基.