Gold & Silversmiths, Dealer in Ivory, Tortoiseshell and Mother o' Pearl Articles. - 24a, Queen's Road, Hong Kong. 30, Old China Street, Canton. Nanking Road, Shanghai.
Some detail of Lee Ching's Hong Kong branch in 1868:
Sketches in China by our own Europeon (Going Round the China Shops. II.)
"We cross the road by the Hongkong Dispensary–not a charitable institution, certainly not, but a chemists shop wherein you may get a penny worth of almost anything for a dollar, and be sure to find it good,–a few steps along the pavement under the shady Verandahs, and here is the scene of our first investigations, a Chinese Silversmiths.
Silver is the universal medium of payment throughout the Chinese Empire, and a thorough acquaintance with it, in all its forms, is indispensable even, for the smallest trader. Everywhere a lump of silver may be used as money without the slightest inconvenience, everyone roughly estimates its value at a glance and the omnipresent balance shews its weight. A person landing at Southampton with a pocket-full of teaspoons and silver forks, but otherwise without resources, would find it difficult to obtain either bed or board without a preliminary visit to a near relation, and a disposal of his treasures at an absurd discount. Not so in China. A Chinaman would pay his hotel-bill with a spoon, his tailor with an assortment of old bowls and handles, and his fare in the passage boat with a prong. Little packets of ' broken silver,' that is, dollars chopped and chopped till they are chopped to pieces, with the value written outside, become a kind of currency in a Chinese town, a currency too that has the advantage of containing change in itself, like the old silver penny that was indented in quarters which you could break off.
Chinese work in silver may therefore be expected to be good, and it does not disappoint expectation. Even skilled labour is cheap here, and the admirable pieces of workmanship which can be obtained, for amounts only very little higher than the price of the silver itself, have made wrought silver a favourite form into which to put presents. It is unfortunate that the heavy and really prohibitive duty on foreign wrought silver in England makes it a matter of great trouble and difficulty to get these presents home. It is not pleasant to take home a cup or salver, the gift and remembrancer of a few friends, with the prospect that an inexorable Custom House may demand something like what it cost here as duty, or failing payment, smash it into pieces and politely hand one the fragments. This is a ' rag of protection ' which still survives, and it may be questioned whether it is wise or just. If the Chinaman can beat Messrs. Hunt and Roskell in a fair field, with no favour, why not let him do so ? Not that it is asserted that he can. Admirable and spirited as is the Chinese carved work, and their historical bas-reliefs in silver are really strikingly good, there are many minutiae of art in which the French or English craftsman far excels them.
Like the Silversmiths in other climes, our Chinese Silversmith is highly respectable and does his business in a highly respectable shop. His shop looks supremely down upon all other China shops, through a glass window. As a rule there are no glass windows to China shops–nothing but an opening, but our Silversmiths wares are valuable, and Chinese thieves have a clever knack of hooking things on to the end of a long bamboo and disappearing with them, and Lee-ching's glass window is intended to keep temptation from such people. There is nothing in the window–no recherche articles displayed to the best advantage, with seductive price tickets loaded with superlative adjectives. If you want to see Lee-ching's wares you must go inside the shop. Inside we go. The shop may be twenty feet deep by ten or twelve feet wide, and the walls are lined with severely respectable blackwood cabinets ornamented with gilt scrolls, and having glazed doors. The effect of these cabinets, seen in the dim religious light which pervades the shop, is sombre–it would be downright melancholy but for the gilt scrolls with which the doors and cornices of the cabinets are ornamented. True the gilding is weak and pallid, and suggestive of jaundiced tea-lead, but, in the midst of so much that is sad it has a cheerful look. A counter runs down one side, and another across the end of the shop. At the end counter three or four shopmen are sitting or lolling. On our entrance they turn round to watch us, but they do not, at first, rise from their seats, or greet us, or commit themselves to any politeness whatever. One bloated aristocrat is smoking a long Chinese water-pipe, with which he make a noise like a clod drinking soup. This water-pipe is a curiosity in its way, and is worth describing. Make an ordinary English long pipe of Pewter. Bend the mouth piece end of the stem backwards until it makes an angle of sixty degrees. Have the bowl six times the usual size, and close up its mouth. Hold this pipe with the stem perpendicular, and call the uppermost side of the bowl the Top atid the lowermost side the Bottom. Make a hole through these two sides, about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Take a hollow cone with a base two and a half inches in diameter, cut off the apex where the diameter is a quarter of an inch, and solder the cone on to the bottom hole in the bowl. Take a tube about an inch long and a quarter of an inch in diameter and solder this to the hole in the top of the bowl. Now take another tube fitting inside this one, and long enough to go right through the bowl and down to within an inch of the bottom of the cone. There is your pipe. The cone is the reservoir for water, the ' bowl' is the reservoir for smoke, and the long tuba is the place in which the tobacco is burned–the true bowl of the pipe. Now prepare to smoke ! Take out the long tube and lay it down. Pour some water into the pipe until the cone is nearly full: by and bye you will be able to tell when to stop pouring, by the sound of the water as it falls in, but for the present fill the pipe too full and then blow into it, when all the superfluous water will squirt out again. Now put in the long tube and all is ready. Will you smoke a la Chimit ? If so, do not say I recommended it! You do it on your own responsibility. Take a small pinch of this finely cut, but rank, raw, palest brown tobacco, and put it into the end of the long tube. You can only put very little in at one time, for there is a grating about an eighth of an inch within the tube, to prevent you from putting in too much at once. Now light your pipe, take two, or at most three whiffs, and your tobacco is finished. Draw the tube half way up, so that the lower end shall be out of the water, and blow ; away go the ashes, drop in the tube and the pipe is ready again. Help yourself to some more tobacco! What no more ? Had quite enough ? Speak up, what do you say ? You feel very curious. Ah well, never mind ! sit down. Don't be alarmed, there is nothing the matter–no! that was not the shock of an earthquake, and the houses opposite are not being doubled up. I know how you feel. You have a sensation as though a thousand pigmies armed with pickaxes and shovels had been drawn into your stomach with each whiff, and now they are digging holes in your mucous membrane. The stomach is the seat of intellect in China, and this is how the Chinese excite their brains. You have been feeling your nose for some time, how do you find it ? ' Gone ! Broken off at the bridge.' Your spine has a tendency to wobble ? Never mind, shut your eyes, and let it wobble. How do you feel now ? " Like the noseless waves of the sea put under a glass shade to boil." Come ! Come! You are getting incoherent. Take a walk. We'll come back to Lee-ching presently.
" Chin chin ! " says Lee-ching, under the impression that ' chin chin' is English for "the top of the morning to you." When I say Lee-ching I mean one of the shopmen, any of whom will tell you that his name is Lee-ching, that that is his shop, and that he made all the things in it, whereas Lee-ching is not a man's name at all, any more than Great Western Railway Company is a man's name. It is what, in Chino-English, is called the Shop name. Chinese Shop names, as a rule, give no clue whatever to the kind of business done; they are usually something nice, some fanciful idea, some moral precept. When A Sing, A Lee and A Tsun set themselves up in business, they do not style themselves A Sing & Co, but the " House of Benevolence and Love " the " Hall of dazzling Light " the " Four points of the Compass " or some such name. Lee-ching means, Increasing profit. Fancy Harry Emanuel calling himself " A hundred per cent," or Swan and Edgar advertising their business as " The Hall of domestic Felicity " ! A Chinaman who could read English would discover a parallel to the custom of his own countrymen in the advertisements headed "Why give more" "Beautiful for ever" and "Do you bruise your Oats? " which expressions he would be sure to regard as Shop-names. I scarcely think these Shop-names should be regarded as the 'style or firm' under which the partners carry on their business. It would seem to me to be a more exact parallel to call the Shop-name the sign of tlte house. As Will Watkyns of the old time, carried on his furriers business at the sign of the Golden horse shoe, so A Sing and A Tsun of today carry on their business at the sign of " Increasing profit."
" Chin chin " says the shopman, having at length opened an eye to business. Would you like a bird-head brooch ?
I do not give you his exact words for, of course, he speaks in pidgin English, and you read all about pidgin English a year ago, in the first Volume of this Magazine. It is notable that, if you are not quick in selecting something in a China shop, the shopmen will save you the trouble by selecting something for you. Lee-ching produces a bird-head brooch. Bird-head is a degraded kind of bone, a nasty, semi-transparent, sickly yellow, greasy looking excrescence which grows on the forehead of a bird found at Hainan. It is without texture, and is tough–it is easy therefore to carve it into the elaborately intricate variations of the willow pattern which are now presented to your gaze, set in gold, in the form of brooches, pins, studs, bracelets and so forth. Seeing that you are interested, Lee-ching produces two birds heads. One a Scull with the excresence on the forehead in all its glory, and duly carved into the willow pattern. The other is like its fellow, but has feathers upon it arranged in a fantastic design: Lee-ching explains with the utmost candour that the feathers did not grow in that form, but that he put them there himself. He also kindly states that the excresence does not grow ready carved into the willow pattern.
But enough of Bird-head ! We come here to see silver ware, which is Leeching's speciality.
The silver of which the articles are made is nine tenths pure, or, as it is here described, ninety touch, that is ninety parts of silver, mixed with ten of copper. Gold for jewelery is also ninety touch, aud is composed of ninety parts of gold, five of silver and five of copper.
Chinese silver ware is embossed, chased, enamelled, but seldom or never engraved. Plane surfaces are avoided because the Chinese cannot make them smooth, such surfaces are always highly polished, but are cut up into ridges and look coarse, and barbaric.
The goods in Lee-ching shop are made to suit the taste of foreigners. There are Tea Pots, beautifully embossed and chased but, alas! their shape is the shape of the fourpenny teapots fashionable in the manufacturing districts ten years ago. There are fairy-like bouquet holders made of the finest filagree, card cases, vases, cups, flower baskets, forks and spoons, salvers, incense burners, knobs for walking sticks, and that is about all. Let us select some specimens.
A chased and Embossed Salver is unusually attractive, for the design is not all willow pattern. True the Willow pattern is round the edge or lip, embossed, wonderfully fine and minute in detail. Every little man has his own expression of countenance, the tiles on the roofs of the little temples are distinguishable one from the other, the construction of the little bridges is plain to be seen. But in the centre the design is an interlacement of the Mantan or Nanking Peony, a beautiful flower, and a favourite object of Chinese Art, of which we shall see some pictures bye and bye at the Ivory shops. Among the Peonies are some " Fung " birds or Phoenixes.
The manufacture of the salver is in this wise. First a smooth silver dinnerplate about eighteen inches in diameter is made and polished. Then the really elegant pattern in the centre is chased (it is sometimes called engraving) with little chisels hammered with a wooden mallet. While one workman is doing this chasing, another is making the figures for the Willow pattern on the edge. Every figure is made separately from a separate piece of silver, and when these are all soldered on, the salver is complete.
This filagree flower basket is made in an entirely different manner. First a silver framework is made. Then some gold leaf and mercury are mixed together until they amalgamate and form a paste. The frame is then warmed, and the amalgam rubbed in, after which the frame is made hot to drive off the mercury, and the gilding is finished. The filagree panels are of lace, marvellously fine in texture, dazzlingly intricate in design, and made of silver wire. Attached to this lace are bunches of leaves and flowers, in green and blue enamel, every bunch a separate work in itself.
A still more remarkable specimen of filagree work is a Chess Queen and Pawn. To attempt to describe the inconceivable intricacy of this piece of work would be to undertake a hopeless task. Every ornament upon the elaborate dresses of the two figures is articulated to the last and most minute detail. Fancy playing a game of chess with such pieces!
By far the most beautiful piece of work which Lee-ching has to show us is a vase or ' Cup ' about two feet high. The pedestal is a clump of plantains growing out of a piece of stony ground, and standing beneath their shade are groups of storks. The vase is graceful in shape and embossed all over with masses of foliage and fruit. The two handles are flying dragons with a horn on each of their noses, the wings, legs and feet of birds, and horrible scaly bodies. Though very fine works in themselves they mar the general contour of the whole. The lid is richly ornamented and surmounted by a well executed group of fruit.
A bit of rural stillness–nothing more; but Chinese–essentially Chinese."
Source: The China Magazine - 1868
See: http://www.925-1000.com/chinex_marks.html
The marks of Lee Ching:
The cup subscribed for and prepared by the Chinese residents for presentation to the Hon. W.T. Mercer, lately Acting Governor and Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, is now on exhibition at the premises of Lee Ching, Queen’s-road. It is one of the most massive and handsome pieces of silver plate ever made by the Chinese and Will be a magnificent ornament to the recipient’s drawing room. It is thoroughly Chinese in workmanship and in design and stands over two feet high, is nearly a foot and a-half broad, and is four feet in circumference round the outer edge. Standing, upon three gorgon-like massive claw-feet, the bowl is beautifully traced with carvings of Chinese scenes, executed in characteristic Chinese style, while on one side is neatly cut the following English inscription :—“ Presented to W.T. Mercer, Esquire, by Kwok Acheung, Cheung Ashau, Wo Han , Tso Tak, and other Chinese residents of Hong Kong, 1868— ‘Long shall we remember you like the genial sun; your ocean—like kindness constantly benefits us.
On the opposite side this inscription is as neatly engraved in Chinese, with the addition of a few of the donors' names not given on the English side. The contributors number, we believe, three times seven , and whether or not there be luck in odd numbers, their appreciation of Mr. Mercer’s many good qualities has taken a very graceful form. Of the value of this fine piece of silver the metal weighs 310 dollars, while altogether the cup has cost 650 dollars. One of the finest features of this presentation plate is the head-piece, which forms the lid; it is composed of three dragons, whose coils (in frosted silver) form the body of the bowl cover ; the three heads give an elegant finish to the upper part, the central and largest dragon head being the centre piece. We understand that the cup will be open to view until the departure of the next mail.
Source: The London and China Telegraph - 25th January 1869
Trev.
