MARK OF GOLDSMITHS & SILVERSMITHS COMPANY LTD., LONDON, 1902

Details

AN EDWARDIAN SILVER CAST STATUETTE OF CONFUCIUS
MARK OF GOLDSMITHS & SILVERSMITHS COMPANY LTD., LONDON, 1902
On pedestal base, mounted on ebonised wood plinth, the front affixed with presentation plaque inscribed The above figure represents Confucius holding an arrow in his robe and he wrote "The superior man is correctly firm and not firm merely", below this is the same saying in Chinese characters, the back with similar plaque with presentation inscription to The Honourable Thomas Henderson Whitehead from the Chinese commercial community of Hong Kong in April 1900.
18 in. (46 cm.) high

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Lot Essay

Whitehead was manager of the Hong Kong branch of The Chartered Bank of India, Australia & China. He also sat on the Hong Kong Legislative Council where he had been instrumental in negotiating with the Chinese authorities in Peking & the mandarins in Canton over the Cassel loan of 1895 whereby Britain loaned the Chinese government a million pounds to help them pay the indemnity they owed to Japan after losing the Sino-Japanese War. He left Hong Kong in 1902 to become the bank's joint-manager in London and the presentation of the statue and a banquet held in his honour is recorded: Compton Mackenzie Realms of Silver-one hundred years of banking in the East, Routledge 1954, p.181.

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