Since ancient times, it has become a common practice to falsify cultural properties. During the Qianlong period, Ji Xiaolan Jida tobacco pouch was planted on a small ink. In his Notes on Yuewei Caotang, there is such a record: "I tried to buy sixteen collars of Luo Xiaohua ink, and the lacquer box was gloomy, which was really old. Try it, it is mud and dyed black, with frost on it, and it is also born in the wetland. " What do you mean? Once University Master Ji bought Gu Mo from Luo Xiaohua, a famous ink maker in Ming Dynasty, only to find that it was made of mud when he went home and even the frost on the surface was long mildew spots. Then he sighed and said, "There is nothing more deceitful than the capital."
In the years of the Republic of China, the phenomenon that ancient cultural relics were falsified and falsified was more prominent. On the one hand, it is due to the serious loss of cultural relics invaded by the great powers in the late Qing Dynasty, and the sharp increase in reselling cultural relics and counterfeiting, on the other hand, it is also due to the continuous improvement of counterfeiting means and technology. During this period, the people who came to Liulichang to buy and sell goods were extremely complicated, and the sources of goods were also miscellaneous. Those endless fake cultural relics made many experts hit their eyes.
Yue Bin does whatever it takes to make a fake, and he also keeps a fake gang.
In 1910, 14-year-old Yue Bin came to Beijing from his hometown of Zhanggezhuang, Hebei Province, and worked as an apprentice in a small antique shop in a temple in Syrah Hutong. He followed his master around dumping secondhand goods and gained a lot of skills. Later, he went it alone, sold a Ming dynasty porcelain according to Song porcelain, made a lot of money, and made a fortune from then on. Yue Bin, a foreigner, often buys precious cultural relics and sells them to foreigners at high prices, causing many national treasures to be lost overseas. One of the most famous is the case of "The Ritual of the Empress Dowager". We have talked about this incident in detail, so I don’t want to say much here: Yanjing’s old story | stealing and destroying national treasures and selling them to the United States, it is inevitable to wash my hands of it.
Yue Bin is a master of counterfeiting. In the late 1930s, he bought a pair of Kangxi tricolor parrots at the cross-goods yard of Beijing Antiques Chamber of Commerce, which was extremely rare. Immediately, people copied three pairs and sold one pair every year and a half, which did not arouse others’ suspicion. In 1941, he had a horizontal bronze elk made with a strange shape, smeared with silver hydrochloride and boiled with alum, smeared for more than a dozen times and boiled for more than 200 hours, and finally turned the bronze from yellow to dark green. But the color changed without rust, so he buried the bronze in the toilet where he urinated and poured urine up every day. It’s disgusting, but after a summer’s exposure, it was dug up in the autumn cold dew, and this "four unlike" seems to be a bronze ware of Shang and Zhou Dynasties unearthed from a new pit. Later, Yue Bin sold it to foreigners at a high price to make huge profits.
In order to make fakes, Yue Bin also hired several experts to repair ancient cultural relics, repair antiques for him, make them look as good as new, or copy them and sell fakes. For example, Zhang Jiqing specially repaired and copied bronzes for him, and Li Huanzhang specially renovated Tang Sancai and earthenware for him. Yue Bin’s Bin Ji was the largest antique shop in Beijing at that time, and it was also the birthplace of the largest counterfeit goods.
If a person just fakes, at least it won’t cause any substantial damage to the cultural relics themselves. But Yue Bin is different. He can destroy the original in order to make his fake real.
Before the "July 7th Incident", Yue Bin sold the head of a stone Buddha of the Northern Wei Dynasty to the American oil magnate for $30,000. Of course, this Buddha’s head is a fake. Yue Bin sent someone to Yungang Grottoes to take a picture of the Buddha’s head first, and then selected the stone, so he copied it. After the "July 7th Incident", the American oil magnate found that the original stone statue was still in its original place, only then did he know that he had been cheated, and he sent a telegram asking for a return. In order to cover up the fact, Yue Bin went mad, paid 3000 yuan to buy off the warlord Sun Dianying’s men, blew up the head of the stone Buddha in Yungang Grottoes, and then sent electricity to the oil king, stating that Yungang had no such stone Buddha, and if there was, it should not only be returned, but also be punished; If it does not, the US should be responsible for compensating him for his reputation loss. As a result, the matter just went away.
There is something fishy about uncovering and mounting ancient paintings.
The means of calligraphy and painting fraud is generally copying. During the period of the Republic of China, experts in counterfeiting not only copied fake paintings to the point of low price. When copying famous paintings abroad, in addition to the painter in place, the oil paints, canvases or drawing boards used must be exactly the same as those used in ancient paintings.
But it’s a fake after all, and there’s a more "advanced" fake that makes you feel wronged even when you say he’s faking it. This is all due to the paper used in Chinese painting. Although rice paper is thin, good rice paper is not a single layer, and famous writers often try to penetrate the back of the paper. Therefore, an "experienced" painter can uncover and mount a real ancient painting into two or even three. In the process of re-mounting the famous painting, they took off a thin layer of the original and stole it, and returned the remaining one to the original owner, which was a copy. Only by carefully comparing the two paintings can we find that the ink color of the copy is slightly lighter. The paperhanger can also sketch the copy again to make it the same color as the original ink.
There are also fake paintings that have been handed down by the painter to dig out the title, fill in the real money, or add the real postscript to pretend to be the real painting; Some paintings, because the painter’s reputation is not high, the painter digs out the real money, replaces it with the fake money of a famous painter, and even forges the "imperial title" and pretends to be a famous painting. The level of this kind of fraud is far higher than that in the past, and of course it also reflects that the level of uncovering and mounting technology has been greatly improved. It is possible to steal the day and confuse the real with the fake through fraud.
In addition to money and inscriptions, there were people who made fake stamps at that time. Han Bowen started reading ancient Zhai to buy and sell calligraphy and paintings of celebrities in Ming and Qing Dynasties. People in the same trade just heard that he could make fake prints and fake paintings, but they couldn’t tell which one was true and which was false. Until 1956, when the public-private partnership was implemented, Han Bowen actually handed over more than 300 fake seals, which made people stunned.
It is impossible to prevent the phenomenon of "killing ripe", and the shopkeeper of antique shop buys fakes at a high price
There was a story in Liulichang that Han Shaoci mistakenly bought Wang Yi’s fake paintings.
Han Shaoci was a famous antique dealer in the Republic of China. He accumulated a lot of experience in buying and selling antiques at ordinary times, and his Yunguzhai was an important antique shop in Liulichang. However, his ability to identify calligraphy and painting is average, mainly relying on his employee Wan Xiaozhu. Wan Xiaozhu helped Han Shaoci earn a lot of money, and later left Han Shaoci to go it alone. In Liulichang, it is common for people to leave the shopkeeper to set up another door, and it is often the latecomers who are better than the former, because the experience accumulated by the latecomers from practice often exceeds the former, which is also a reason why Liulichang can continue to prosper and develop.
Two months after Wan Xiaozhu left Yunguzhai, a collector from Changshu in the south of the Yangtze River wrote to Yunguzhai, claiming that he had a vertical axis of Wang Yi’s landscape, and invited Wan Xiaozhu to Changshu to see the painting and discuss the price of the flour. Han Shaoci thought that Wan Xiaozhu had left him, and this good painting must not fall into his hands, so he quickly sent someone to Changshu to bring the famous painting of Wang Miao to Beijing.
After painting to Yun Gu Zhai, Han Shaoci opened it and saw that it was a landscape vertical shaft with a length of 4 feet and a width of 1 foot and 5 inches. The brushwork was magnificent, and the painting was surrounded by pines and several miscellaneous trees, which shaded the cottage. A guest was walking across the bridge with a cane, and the water under the bridge shook the stone, as if there were sounds. This is exactly the scene that often appears in Wang Yi’s works. Draw the inscription "Wang Yi, the history of cultivating cigarettes". Put two seals on it: "Seal of Wang Yi", printed in white; "History of Farming Tobacco", printed by Zhu Wenfang. Han Shaoci decided that it was the original of Wang Miao, and it came from Changshu, Wang Miao’s hometown, and there was no mistake, so he bought the painting at a high price.
After the news that Han Shaoci bought the original Wang Yi came out, the famous experts of calligraphy and painting in Liulichang came to ask for appreciation. After they read it, some hesitated and remained silent; Someone said quietly, "This is an old painting of the Qing Dynasty, which is an imitation of the Yushan school painter. The original painting has no money, and the money and seal on it seem to be written by Zhang Jianxuan …" This sentence reminds the dreamer. After watching the original painting again and again, Han Shaoci recognized that the handwriting of the inscription really came from Zhang Jianxuan, who was famous for imitating others’ handwriting in the glass-thinning factory. And the painting is not shallow enough to enter the lower level, which is obviously a new seal; Looking closely at the painting, the brushwork is tender, and it is not as sophisticated as the old man Ishiguro’s brushwork. Han Shaoci did buy fake paintings.
But this whole thing is actually a trap set by Wan Xiaozhu on purpose. It turned out that in Yunguzhai, Han Shaoci always boasted that he was an expert in the identification of Wang Yi’s paintings, and he could tell the truth at a touch, but in fact the real appraiser was Wan Xiaoju. So Wan Xiaoju decided to try Han Shaoci’s eyesight after she set up another portal. Coincidentally, just as he left Yun Guzhai, he saw a fake painting pretending to be Wang Hao in Liulichang. The strokes were good and the momentum was good, but there was no next payment, so he bought the painting and asked Zhang Jianxuan to leave a fake money. Then, he sent the painting to Changshu, and the trustee wrote a letter from Changshu to Yunguzhai for sale, which led to the above-mentioned production.
In Liulichang, there is also a story about Chen Jie, who is familiar in the field of cultural relics, being cheated by collecting ancient seals.
Chen Jieqi was a native of Qing Dynasty, and his hometown was Wei County, Shandong Province. He was an expert in collecting ancient seals. On one occasion, he told his friend Wang Xiquan that he had collected many ancient seals of Qin and Han dynasties, but only some seals of Zhou and Qin languages had not been collected. From that half a year later, one morning, a woodcutter was resting in front of Chen Jieqi’s house with firewood and a cigarette pole, which happened to be seen by Chen Jieqi who was going out. He saw an ancient seal tied to the woodcutter’s tobacco pouch, and with the turmoil of the tobacco rod, the ancient seal kept moving.
Chen Jieqi took the seal and looked at it. He was overjoyed. It was the kind of ancient seal he was looking for. Chen Jieqi asked, "Where did you get this seal?" The woodcutter said, "When I was growing vegetables, I went down one day and seemed to come across something. I dug it up and found it." Chen Jieqi’s heart said that it really didn’t take much effort to get it, so he had to pay for it. As a result, the woodcutter not only refused him, but later saw Chen Jieqi pestering him, and simply took up the burden and left. Finally, Chen Jieqi sent someone to catch up with him, dragged the woodcutter back and gave him five hundred strings of money before he bought this ancient seal.
But this is also a fake. It was his good friend Wang Xiquan who listened to Chen Jieqi’s words and bribed the woodcutter to design this little trap. I don’t know if these two later friends have done their best …
The water in the literary world is too deep, not to mention an antique white wandering around, but it is common for an expert to buy a fake. A while ago, I went to visit Daliushu, and there were more people everywhere than things on the stalls. A stall owner said that everyone wanted to pick up the leaks, but where are there so many leaks waiting for you to pick up? I want to tell you that it’s a good thing that we have "Antique close encounter of mahjong", so we followed the hero in the story and read all the tricks in the antique business!
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