Footnotes

Treasury 3, no. 381


刻銘滑石鼻煙罐
孫玄,1846年

The Ancient Prunus Soapstone

Soapstone; very well hollowed with a rounded lip and recessed circular foot surrounded by a flat footrim; incised in draft script with three poems on the prunus blossom, followed by 'On the fifteenth day of the twelfth month of the bingwu year of the Daoguang period, Sun Xuan (?) made three poems about the prunus blossom by assembling lines from ancient poems'; the foot carved with a functioning seal in seal script, Peiyan zhenshang (For the precious appreciation of Peiyan), the footrim doubling as its frame
1770–1846
Decoration: Sun Xuan (?), 1846
Height: 4.55 cm
Mouth/lip: 1.53/2.30 cm
Stopper: coral; ivory collar
Condition: two small and several more miniscule chips and bruises to the outer footrim; some circular scratching on the lip from long contact with the stopper; the usual pattern of wear all over the soft surface, not obtrusive; the engraving softened through use but all still clearly legible; the seal on the base worn flatter than it originally was through use, but still both functional and clearly legible. General relative condition: excellent

Provenance:
Trojan Collection
Robert Hall (1993)
Published:
Hall 1992, no. 35
Kleiner 1995, no. 294
Treasury 3, no. 381
Exhibited:
British Museum, London, June–October 1995
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, July–November 1997

Commentary
Because of the extensive connoisseurship of Chinese soapstone, recorded in many sources over the past century, we can identify this material as Shoushan stone from Fujian province. This is a relatively common variety from the province that provided much of the finest soapstone material, although by no means all of it (see under Treasury 3, no. 380). It is distinguished by its colour which can become quite valuable if the red is rich, even and pleasing, and the red is often associated with cream-coloured or greyish areas (see, for instance, Treasury 3, no. 383).

This is formally one of a group of small snuff pots which seem to have been a development of the nineteenth century. They are usually squat, basically cylindrical forms with very wide mouths and they appear in porcelain from the first half of the nineteenth century. There is even one known glass overlay of similar shape which would be dated to the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century (see Kleiner 1987, no. 118). The shape is very much rarer in materials other than ceramics and this is the only known version in soapstone, although for one in aragonite, see Treasury 3, no. 389.

Inscribed around the bottle in literate draft script are three poems:

To purify my heart, I quietly wait for the prunus to bloom, reading the lyrical poems of Chu.
[These flowers] do not vie with the orchids for dazzling beauty.
Rather, they acquire a tenacious bearing thanks to the frost and snow.

Only the monk living in the neighbourhood and I appreciate their freshness.
Common people hardly notice their elegance.
Viewed toward the evening, at full bloom, they look even more beguiling,
Until the gleaming full moon makes its descent beyond the southern branches.

When spring arrives at the West Lake, flowers are to be seen everywhere.
The first thing to find out is the distance of the journey
[At the end of which are] crimson cliffs and luxuriant rock-faces thousands of zhang high;
[In addition,] ancient trees and eight or nine families [scatter about] in a remote village.

Writing poems by putting together lines from existing poems is an old practice in China. In this case, the first line is by the Tang poet Yang Juyuan, the second by the Song poet Su Shi, and so on. What is intriguing about these twelve lines is the fact that they appear as the third poem and the first four lines of the fourth poem in a series of fourteen poems 'put together' by Luo Wenmo (1902–1951 or 1904–1950; see Deyi qianqiu 1999, p. 158). Since the inscription is precisely dated (by the Daoguang reign name in addition to the cyclical date) to 1846, the engraver is obviously not copying from Luo, who hadn't been born yet; rather, it is likely that the engraver and Luo Wenmo independently copied from some source that had put these lines together before 1846. (Although Luo's verses are presented as having been assembled by him, whoever found them among his papers after his passing obviously had not seen this snuff bottle and therefore had no reason not to assume Luo was responsible for them.)
Luo Wenmo's verses alert us to another interesting fact. These are not three quatrains, as the engraver thinks they are; they are regulated verses, or rather one-and-a-half regulated verses. The first eight lines are a complete regulated verse, as Luo correctly presents them. This tells us that Mr. Sun, the engraver or designer, spoke a northern dialect, or at least a dialect in which the entering tone had disappeared. Why? Because he thought that the fifth line rhymes. It would more or less rhyme to the ear of someone who read the poem in, say, Mandarin, and that has certain consequences. Because the fifth line cannot rhyme in a regulated octave (only even-numbered lines can rhyme, with optional rhyme in the first line), our Mr. Sun concluded, very reasonably, that he was looking at the first line of a new quatrain. The fact that it had the same rhyme as lines 1, 2, and 4 ahead of it might have given him pause, but there is nothing inherently wrong with two adjacent poems having the same rhyme. Now, anyone capable of writing poetry himself, which would have meant following the Tang dynasty rhyme categories and ignoring even major pronunciation changes since the tenth century or so, would have known that the last syllable in the fifth line did not rhyme; it was an entering-tone syllable, ending in a final ~k. So Mr. Sun was not very educated. Moreover, if Mr. Sun had spoken a dialect in which the entering tone still existed (and this would include Min, the language of the area where this stone is quarried) he would have literally heard the final ~k (or at least a vestige of it) and would have known it did not rhyme with the other rhyme words in the poem, which are (in Mandarin) qi, ci, ci, zhi, and zhi. He heard (in Mandarin) xi, and drew the wrong conclusions.
This tells us something about his level of education, but it also suggests that the bottle had left the Fujian area before the inscription was carved in 1846. Whether it was a long time before or a short time before, we cannot say.
Since the snuff bottle and the popular seal of the Chinese artist are of a similar size-range, from time to time one finds a snuff bottle which doubles as a functional seal. Many snuff bottles have seals on their base, i.e. inscriptions in seal characters (names, dates), but very few of them are mirror images that can be impressed to be legible as a print of the image. This is one of them and what defines it, of course, is the fact that characters are the wrong way round if read directly from the bottle. The seal characters read: 'For the precious appreciation of Peiyan,' Peiyan presumably being the name of the owner of the bottle, and perhaps another name for Mr. Sun. Since the later addition of this relief script would have involved recutting the entire foot area, including the footrim, we can assume it was original. For an eighteenth-century jade bottle with a functioning seal from the Gerry Mack Collection, see Sotheby's, New York, 25 October 1997, lot 87. For another example of a functional seal in this collection, see Treasury 3, no. 392.
When this bottle was re-stoppered some years ago, the point was rather missed that the flat, collar-like stopper in ivory was actually made especially for it, possibly originally, and that bottles of this shape often had such flat stoppers. It is shown the way it should be seen in the Robert Hall publication cited above (see also discussion under Treasury 3, no. 389).


古梅花滑石

滑石；掏膛完整，圓唇、圓形斂底、平底圈足；刻詠梅花詩三首，其後注曰"道光丙午嘉平之月望拼集古梅花詩三則"，再後有二字， 不能辨，強猜測為"孫玄" （？）二字，底刻 "佩言珍賞"四字篆款，以圈足為邊框，器底可當印章

壺：1770～1846
刻紋：孫玄（？），1846年
高：4.55 厘米
口經/唇經：1.53/2.30厘米
蓋：珊瑚，象牙座
狀態敘述：圈足沿有兩截小缺口，還有一些微不足道的缺口和擦傷，唇面因老觸碰著蓋座而呈現環行的擦傷，表面呈現一般性的損耗，刻字有所侵蝕而尚可念，足底刻的印章因煙壺長期應用而稍微磨平，但尚可念；一般性狀態：極善

來源：
Trojan珍藏
羅伯特．霍爾（1993）
文獻：
Hall 1992, 編號35
Kleiner 1995, 編號294
Treasury 4, 編號381

展覽：
大英博物館, 倫敦, 1995年6月～10 月
Israel Museum, 耶路撒冷, 1997年7月～11月

說明：
因為百年以來對中國滑石的鑒賞比較發達，我們可以認定本壺的材料是福建省出產、雕刻藝術具有悠久歷史的壽山石。
壺型乃是十九世紀中流行的小鼻煙罐， 身型矮胖，口大，從十九世紀前半就有陶瓷的。十八世紀末或十九世紀初也出現了形式相近的一件玻璃套料壺（見Kleiner 1987, 編號118）。但陶瓷鼻煙罐以外，這個形式是罕見的。白理石的鼻煙罐有如伯樂氏珍藏Treasury 3, 編號389，但現存所聞所見的滑石鼻煙罐只有本壺。

罐身所刻詩為集句詩，第一句是楊巨源作的，第九句是蘇軾作的，今不枚舉，唯令人迷惑的是此銘記十二句也出現在羅文謨詩文輯佚作品中，是《詠梅集句十四首》之三首和第四首的前四句（見德藝千秋，頁158）：
三
應將清淨結心期
靜待梅花讀楚詞
不與蕙蘭爭素艷
直教霜雪定堅姿
澄鮮只共鄰僧惜
風韻寧教俗子知
向晚十分看更好
一輪寒魄墜南枝
四
春入西湖到處花
打頭先探驛程賒
丹崖翠壁千萬丈
老木荒村八九家
......

藝術家羅文謨1902年生，1951年卒（或作1904年生，1950年卒），而此鼻煙罐明明是道光丙午年刻的銘文，這十二句顯然不可能是羅文謨作的集句詩。我們推測：第一，本壺的刻手和羅文謨兩人都是抄寫別人1846年以前拼集而成的詩的，只是整理羅氏遺草的編輯組不明白《詠梅集句十四首》的來歷，以為它們是他的作品，儘管一部分可能是羅氏追加的，本壺的物證告訴我們，討論中的十二句一定是羅文謨抄錄的；第二，刻手以為他刻的是三首絕句詩，不知道是一首半的律詩，而這說明他大概以為第五句"惜"字是平聲字，所以他誤認為這首律詩的後四句是獨立的平起入韻正格七絕。七絕不入韻的的確是有的，但看期、詞、姿、知、枝五個字都押韻，刻手應該考慮這八句是否都屬於同一首律詩，從而再考慮，"惜"的普通話發音是否把人引入歧途的。

這也就表明刻手大概是北方人，他的語言沒有入聲，也不保留入聲遺跡的特定調值。也許是墨菲定理的實例，全銘文中不能辨認的兩個字就是刻手的名字，"佩言"亦不知何人也，我們無從追尋。但這也提醒我們，鼻煙罐雕成（大概在壽山一區）以後，很可能翻過了好幾個年頭才有人追刻銘文，在那段時間裏本罐流轉到北方是很符合事理的。

至於足底的印章，煙壺和圖章的大小差不了多少，有時候可以碰到如本壺，雙作用的煙壺。不管瓶身的詩文是否後來才刻上的，足底的圖章一定的原來的，要追加這樣的浮雕字樣就必須重新再雕刻罐足，包括圈足。Mack珍藏所收的一件十八世紀玉煙壺也帶實用的圖章； 參見蘇富比，紐約，1997年十月25 日，拍賣品號87。 Treasury 3, 編號392是另一個例子。

蓋的平面塞是原件，而大概是特別為本罐作的；鼻煙罐經常帶有平面塞。上舉Hall 1992, 編號35的照相顯示它正當的樣子。