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I thought readers may like to see examples of some very rare jade seals, which passed through my hands several years ago.
The custom made box is normally a good sign of quality, and dates to around the 1930's, but the consensus of the two experienced Hong Kong jade dealers shown these was that they were Han dynasty (circa 2,000 years ago), but the inscriptions were much later, possibly made at the same time as the box.
I doubt many of you will agree, and I personally am not sure of their age, other than to say the set is at least around 70 to 80 years old.

Sorry Mr Allen, these are fakes. If you don't belive me take them to Christies at Alexander house HK.

The jade is bad quality and 3 of the same type of brown colored material. The carving is very poor. This isn't han it is modern. The carcass of the box appears to be cupboard. In authentic chinese cloth covered boxes the carcass is entirely wood not cupboard.

Lee, if you haven't already gathered, I would just like you to know that I haven't a great deal of respect for your jade knowledge or connoissership; even less so when you dismiss something as fake without giving any reason.

May I remind you what you said about the censer and the set of jade thumb rings posted last week. "Sorry Mr Allen, These are fakes. The censer is made in the 1960s. The other stuff in the box appears to be brand new". Then you changed your mind on the "other stuff".

Most readers will never have occasion to see such a fitted box, nor the lovely hand carved wood stands that were custom made for many better quality 19th century and earlier jade carvings. In dismissing them as fakes, without any reason, you show again your own arrogance and ignorance. These seals are not yet sufficiently valuable to grace a Christies auction. Nor I might add would Christies accept the assertion of the anonymous Lee, that they were fake.

How old they are is yet to be determined. You seem to have a problem that I date them at least 70 or 80 years old. Fake is new, to which I say again "rubbish". You obviously don't know what you are talking about.

To the numbers of readers who hopefully enjoy these posts, judging by the hits, please don't be concerned at the personal attacks I sustain on what are pretty conservative assertions on my behalf. Just because you are Chinese does not mean you are expert on Chinese, any more than Americans generally are on Indian artifacts, or New Zealanders are on Maori. Bill and Lee are clear evidence of that.

Mr Allen, I take your criticism as personal. Sure there are Chinese with no experience in Chinese art and there are ones that are very good at it. I regard myself as the latter. I am giving my opinion as a person with lots of experience on the field and as a consultant to some auction houses. I cannot state some thing is genuine when it looks fake. Show me a genuine piece and I will state it is genuine, do not take it personally. It wouldn't matter if these pieces were owned by the president- it would still be fake, in my opinion. The turtle seal with the same bad material and carving on all 3 pieces it can only be common sense that the pieces were carved from the skin of same jade boulder. There is nothing that I can see that points to Han dynasty. Sorry.

Mr Allen, when you post an item on this forum you are bound to find different opinion regarding your item,you make plenty of comments about other member's items being fake but gets all defensive when someone else makes a valid point. These seals are very obvious fakes. They are found commonly in jade markets, the ones that Anita and her friends mention frequently. Han dynasty jade seals for officials and courts would be made from fine white or yellow jade pebbles. Much like the ones displayed in museums in China and Taipei. The carving is fine and beautiful. Yours have broad cuts and the back spine of the tortoise looks like a ladder. The head is carved like a round blop. It is too crude to be a seal for the elite. Also the 3 pieces are the same dark veined jade material which originate from the same layer of a large jade boulder. It was a common way to reproduce old jade carving taking material from the skin of a large jade boulder. However true old jade patina and inclusion does not look like that. By the way such cloth boxes and stands with cardboard on the inside were commonly found in items bought from China in the 1970s and 80s, and therefore no indicator that the item is old.
I was honest to reinstate that the the jadiete set was of the 1930s and the jade rings contemporary to the 1930s and admit that the initial opinion was wrong from the new larger photos. However the censer is new as I have seen such at auctions with the grease and soot applied on them selling for a couple of dollars as modern. The cut is also broad and rough a obvious sign of machine cut.
You should send the photos of your jade seal set to Christies by e-mail for opinion and valuation. The e-mail address for Chinese art specialist can be found on christies.com .It is easy and free, I always do that to audit the expensive pieces, just in case one was taken for a ride.

I would like to hear your opinion and reason why you think these seals are old and not recent reproduction. Also post some pictures of similar examples at museums to back your claim.

It seems Tony A. might have different standards for "modern fakes" or he simply cannot define what exactly "modern fakes" are. I wonder if he will apply similar standard for the ceramics sold by him.

When I posted some of the Hongshan style jade carvings here a while ago, he would call every single piece "modern fake". When I asked him why, he said because he saw "modern tool marks" on them. The funny thing was when I asked him to explain what exactly modern tool marks were at that time, he couldn't but instead asked other members to recommend me some references for modern tool marks so that I would not ask so many questions.

The problem is while all these pieces could not be that of Hongshan, I did not believe all of them were modern either because many of them were made of unique and genuine nephrite jade, weighed more than 800 grams, and the tool marks found on some of them were left by manual jade working tools and not by modern high speed modern tools (like on the jade fish I have, their holes were drilled side way on each side of the fish, if it was made modern, it would be drilled from one side, straight forward). Therefore, I believed they were OLD but I could not tell how old, but they could not be "modern" (modern to me meant these jade carvings were made in the last twenty years or made after early 60s with modern jade working tools).

However, if we would define "modern fakes" as those that were made less than 100 years ago and if their sole purposes are to be sold as antique or archaic jades by misleading buyers to their real ages. Then I am afraid most of my Hongshan pieces would indeed be "modern fakes" because there were simply no ways I could prove that they were more than 100 years old.

Well, this seems to apply to Tony's "Han Dynasty" jade seals also. First of all, I actually like them. I believe they were made in "Han Dynasty" style and the turtle (tortoise) on top of each seal looks good. Unfortunately, their material do not look that great, the carving quality of the seals are just average. Each seal seems to be carved with the turtle facing different direction. How weird! The Chinese characters carved on them are truly puzzling and appear to serve no purposes. (Not proper names; so when will one use them?) Also, it was very unusual for any Chinese seal makers to use real nephrite jade to make Chinese seals due to their high hardness (nephrite jade is not a good seal carving material). They would prefer softer material. In my experinece, any brown stone is usually not good news and very often not nephrite jade or low qaulity nephrite jade that was dyed brown to look old.

However, Tony A. seemed to be highly offended when Lee said that "these are fakes" and he responded:

"How old they are is yet to be determined. You seem to have a problem that I date them at least 70 or 80 years old. Fake is new, to which I say again "rubbish". You obviously don't know what you are talking about."

(*What exactly is new? What exactly is OLD? What exactly is MODERN?)

The problem to me, if even these seals are indeed 70 to 80 years old as Tony A believes, but if they were made in the style of Han dynasty and they are indeed less than 100 years old, then I am afraid they would be indeed "modern fakes" whether he likes it or not, just like he would call all my HS jade carvings and those Qing/Ming jades that were posted by kk as "modern fakes".

May be somebody else can clarify what exactly "modern fakes" are.

Thanks.

Bill

Dear Tony

I think I have picture of Eastern Han jade official seal in shape of turtle with spinal bone like this set you have.

Let me search my library and I will keep you posted.

Rgs
Anita

Lee

Have you ever known about famous auction houses' business?

They will not authenticate your jade artifact unless it has good provenance like "property of Her Royal Highness Home coming Queen Anita Mui".which can drive their sale to sky high. Because jade is too difficult to authenticate and 99.99% in the market are fakes.

The best reply from them you get is "sorry, it's not suitable for our upcoming sale".

Have fun
Anita

If I remember well the use of turtle on a seal, during the Han dynasty, was exclusively for use of high rank military such as army general.
The turtle being the symbol of long life, it makes sense.

Just for information.

Anita, all my pieces have been authenticated by either auction houses with no trouble. So I do trust them and my own judgement. It is not hard to tell real and fake jade if you handled enough. I was right all of KK's hongshan jade pictures were genuine and you got it wrong again as well as with other pieces i post, but KK got them right. I was surprised he knows what he is saying. Sorry to say you don't.

"All my pieces have been authenticated by either auction houses with no trouble."

SUPPORTING DOCUMENT IF ANY?

"I was right all of KK's hongshan jade pictures were genuine and you got it wrong again as well as with other pieces i post, but KK got them right. I was surprised he knows what he is saying. Sorry to say you don't."

YES, FOR EXAMPLE, ONLY SMALL DISC CUTS USED TO MAKE ARCHAIC JADE, EBAY CLOISONNE IS AUTHENTIC MING DYNASTY...ON AND ON.

Lee, you seem to overlook the point that I said, and I quote, "I doubt many of you will agree, and I personally am not sure of their age, other than to say the set is at least around 70 to 80 years old".
I based this statement on the custom made box. Having said these seals are FAKE, you now say the boxes were made in the 1970's and 1980's in China. China was closed to the West until 1979, which pretty much rules out the 1970's and I was travelling in China regularly from 1984, and never saw any custom made boxes like this in my travels.

You also made some unsubstantiated claims that the cloisonne box recently posted was Ming dynasty and worth $15,000; statements which I and several contributors consider to be incorrect.

If you want to be so assertive when you are obviously incorrect, please don't take it personally when others disagree.

Mr Allen, you are correct that my initial valuation of 15 thousand for the cloisone box was over stated, as the initial pictures that Eric send was rather small. Yes the cloisone was late 19th -early 20th century, replicating ming cloisone to supply the western and local market with antiques, as antique collecting was popular in the era. Quite often in boxes such as these, antique jades were used for inlays, that was my assumption. However in light on of the new picture the jade pieces appears to be manufactured in the late 19th early 20th century. Which means this box would only be worth 1000-2000USD. Some boxes of this type, manufactured in the very early part of the 20th century do use real antique jade of the Ming or Ching dynasty for inlay- this seems to correspond with early Puyi reign where the eunaches stole and sold palace treasures at antique shops though out Peking.

Dear Anthony,

You're right, it looks like souvenir box produced after 1960'

Seals are recent too, they are not 'fake'since they haven't been made to fake anything, it is more like a souvenir box reflecting Chinese Culture...

regards,

Pipane

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