C3 A “18 war lords” snuff bottle

Description

Description: A Chinese porcelain snuff bottle of meiping form, decorated with 18 deer, one monkey and a spider. This is a very rare motif. There is a well-known common motif represented by the puns of  “deer” (lu) for “official salary” (lu), wasp (feng) for “confer” (feng), and “monkey” (hou) for “high-ranking noble” (hou), together meaning “May you receive high rank and emoluments”. (For this motif, see the bottle C23 in this section). But here we have a spider instead of wasps. It has been not easy to find the meaning of this motif, because as said it is quite rare. In fact, in many years we have only found this motif six times, two of which are in our collection, represented by this bottle and a hat stand. The motif is most interesting: in “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, there was a story called 十八路诸侯讨董卓 about 18 local war lords made a pact to fight the evil prime minister Dongzhuo and the motif came from that. We have 十八 (eighteen)路 (deer) 诸 (spider) and 侯 (monkey). This is Chinese symbolism using homophones to the extreme.

Mark:

Dating: 19^th century

Material: Porcelain decorated over glaze with iron red and black enamels. Glazed inside.

Size: 79 mm

Stopper: Glass imitating agate with black collar and bone spoon

Provenance: Ex Carlo Cottarelli Collection, Milano, Italy. Bought directly from him.

Reference: This motif is very rare. Up to now we have found only one other snuff bottle with the same motif, see last picture, where it has not been interpreted because, as said, it is a difficult hidden meaning. And on four porcelain items, one of them is in our collection, see the hat stand R13 in the Late Qing/Republic ware.

Notes: About Carlo Cottarelli collection, see the Notes in C2.