A MOULDED AND ENAMELLED PORCELAIN ‘CHESS’ MEIPING-FORM SNUFF BOTTLE
A MOULDED AND ENAMELLED PORCELAIN ‘CHESS’ MEIPING-FORM SNUFF BOTTLE

QING DYNASTY, 1810-1880

Details
A MOULDED AND ENAMELLED PORCELAIN ‘CHESS’ MEIPING-FORM SNUFF BOTTLE
QING DYNASTY, 1810-1880
The bottle is moulded with a basketwork design enamelled in green, the gaps between the weave filled with characters representing Chinese chess pieces in iron-red and black. The flat base is unglazed. Together with a doucai porcelain snuff dish decorated with peach fruits.

Bottle: 3 ½ in. (7.9 cm.) high, porcelain stopper; Dish: 1 13/16 in. (4.6 cm.) diam. (2)
Provenance
Bottle: An Asian collection, sold at Sotheby’s Olympia, 13 June 2003, lot 815
Dish: The Wilson Collection, sold at Sotheby’s New York, 23 March 1998, lot 272
Literature
Bottle: Hugh Moss and Stuart Sargent, The Water Pine and Stone Retreat Collection of Snuff Bottles. Part Two. Non-Imperial Influence over the Snuff Bottle Arts, Hong Kong, 2019, no. 21.3.466

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Priscilla Kong
Priscilla Kong

Lot Essay

This is the largest known, and one of the most elaborate, of a series of snuff bottles from the nineteenth century imitating wine jars in protective basketwork.
The characters on the bottle represent pieces in Chinese chess. There are some anomalies, however. Shuai 帥 (‘General’) is miswritten as shi 師 (a word that can refer to soldiers but is not the name of a chess piece); moreover, while shuai normally is used only for the General on the red side, this bottle uses the name in both colours. Similarly, for Elephants, Cannons, and Soldiers, only the names of the red team (xiang 相、pao 炮、bing 兵) are used on this bottle, not the names for the corresponding black pieces (xiang 象、pao 砲、zu 卒). Perhaps the designer of this bottle understood that a simple array of all the names of the fourteen pieces in black and red would be too sober for a wine jar—less interesting than a random pattern that is reminiscent of the board game.

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