Saturday Morning, September 21, 2024
Saturday's auction is the combination of two homes, two separate lives, but both joined by similar tastes. Furniture category quite full with designer pieces including outdoor deck furniture. All other categories fall into categorical order, so to speak. Our number one photographer is on vacation.
A Taste of Honey
A cup of tea, a coated pill. Mixed, in time, both conjure ill.
This night the wind had shifted to the south. The sea drove into their harbor, bobbing and bouncing the wooden skiffs they rode. Darkness promised protection so friends and neighbors alike rowed out to stare at the tall sailing ships sitting sentinel.
Enameled & carved cameo Peking glass.
Selection of Chinese snuff bottles from early twentieth century to contemporary.
Contemporary carved cameo vase, 6 ½" H.
Silently they approached, their oars skimming the waves. They stopped and listened. Voices. How strange the language. How strange these mariners looked. In the lantern glow on deck you could see them. Their eyes, so wide, and round. Beards on most hid their skin color. White perhaps, more so a weathered red and brown.
No matter how many times they visited, there was never enough spice, silk, or tea to buy. But this flotilla was different. They looked little like the usual trading barques. What was it? A blinding flash filled the night, exposing them to these foreigners. In an instant, explosions erupted overhead, a force pushing their boats backward, an intense heat burning their faces. The skiffs scattered like birds in flight. Away they rowed, fear guiding their path. Moments later, cannonballs rained down onto their city. Dinghai. 1840. The Opium War was underway.
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
Addiction. A fatal human flaw. It arrives to us in multiple ways. In nineteenth-century England, tea was the culprit. The nation demanded the best. Enter China. The glitch was payment. China would only accept silver. No foreign fiat for them. As England's coffers emptied, they needed a solution to balance trade. King and country, James.
1903 gold quarter eagle. Nothing quite matches the addiction to gold,
an attraction with no equal.
Their solution was simple. Aided by the Americans, British poppy fields in India produced an unending supply of opium. Realizing highly addictive opium was outlawed in China, the foreigners setup elaborate smuggling rings to infuse the drug into the country. One player, Warren Delano, Jr., founded his family wealth in this trade. His grandson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became our 32nd president.
14k yellow gold bracelet and charms.
Like a flame to a summer prairie, the acceptance snowballed. Despite efforts to curtail this incursion, the Chinese lost ground. Illegal substances are dangerous. They know no cultural bounds, nor care. An unfettered tiger, better monkey. Once introduced, it is a one-way ticket down. They destroy all in its path. The deeper you go, the higher you fly. The higher you fly, the deeper you go. Planned and organized destruction. At least the trade balance was solved.
How Now Kowtow
The battle raged for decades. A weak government is far more dangerous than a well-armed army. Where the latter deters conflict, the former invites it. All the right-handed handshakes and smiles are useless if you don't carry a left-handed fist.
Signed Special Edition Pearl S. Buck, China As I See It. 1970.
Selection of signed Buck books. From a closed home, the owner was once a volunteer at Green Hills Farm in the 1980's.
Through the nineteenth century the west used a wringer on the east. Each time the Chinese military challenged, they were crushed. Not just in lives lost and humiliation, but in retribution. The Chinese were forced to rebuild the invader's arsenal. The cost was steep. The custom of kowtowing, those seeking favor of the Emperor on bended knee, reversed. Success in the moment, unknown consequences in time.
Chinese hand painted enameled snuff bottles. ↓
The single darkest moment for China was the day English and French troops ransacked, pillaged, and looted the Imperial Gardens of Yuanmingyuan, aka, the Summer Palace. Here, on 830 acres, sat the archive of Chinese heritage. Objects over 5,000 years old, a direct line to the Chinese culture's ancestors, were tossed to the winds. In three days, 4,000 soldiers reduced this magnificence to rubble.
It was Sherman's March to the Sea. Elgin's removal of the marble sculptures from Greece. Napoleon's theft of the Mona Lisa. Festering wounds never heal. The Chinese still honor the Garden's skeletal remains, never to be forgotten. In utter irony, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was responsible for removing Greece's treasured marbles. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, ordered destruction of the Imperial Gardens.
14k yellow gold locket, Year of the Snake.
The Scorched Earth
After the west destroyed China, the nation fell into feudalism. Fiefdom against fiefdom. Poverty, starvation, lost opportunities. The country wallowed into the twentieth century. A fertile bed for communism. A similar political structure strengthened through central state control and complete annihilation of individual rights. When Japan invaded China in the 1930's, the Communist's formed an army. By 1949, they gained control of their homeland driving the western sympathizers onto Taiwan. And here we stand.
Signed book by master craftsman George Nakashima.
If you beat a puppy, he will never forget you. Never. Today, America faces an unending supply of fentanyl streaming across our southern border. Its source? China. The outcome? Societal destruction. A tremendous loss of our children. A modern-day Pied Piper. Does history repeat itself, or are we simply ignorant of the writing on the wall. Question is, which wall? The Great Wall or America's porous wall?
A cup of tea, a coated pill. Mixed, in time, both conjurn ill.
Doors open at 8 AM. Auction starts at 9 AM. PA AU 1265L [bb]