I posted 24 photos on Facebook in the album “” http://t.co/rXV8Xpuh

Our latest container of ‘Classical’ Chinese furniture arrives next week. most of it already presold and including around 30 pieces that have been produced ‘to order’ according to specifications that we have agreed with customers. In most cases these tend to be quite small tweaks to our standard designs – larger or smaller versions of our dining tables for example, or a different finish than standard for a painted cabinet. Sometimes though we will work with a customer to come up with something quite unique and this is always rewarding as we go from initial discussions for the design of a piece of furniture through to seeing the finished piece.

One such piece arrived on a recent container and our customer in London received it a couple of months ago. She was delighted with the final product and was kind enough to share photos of the cabinet sitting proudly in her apartment. The brief for this piece was to come up with a design for a cabinet that would act as a home office – containing space for PC monitors, printer and keyboard as well as storage for suspension files and other office equipment. Our customer wanted a design that would allow her to shut everything away out of site when not in use, disguising the practicality on the inside with a wow factor on the outside.

The resulting design, shown in the initial drawing and photos of the final cabinet above, was based around our popular ‘Shanxi Painted Cabinet‘, finished in black lacquer with gold leaf and traditional paintings of children against an oriental landscape. Together with the customer we created a design in two parts. The top section holds PC equipment while the bottom, separate section includes a filing cabinet and drawers. The doors on each section are mounted on normal hinges, but include a second set of hinges fitted in the middle, allowing them to fold back on themselves to reduce the space required. The shelf for the computer keyboard pulls out on runners, fixed with chains allowing our customer to sit more comfortably at the ‘desk’. The filing cabinet on the right of the bottom section, and the adjacent drawers, are hidden behind the decorated doors when the unit is closed.

The whole design offers an extremely neat solution for hiding away a home office, and with the doors closed, the cabinet is a truly stunning piece of furniture.

For further details about our ‘made to order’ service or if you would like to discuss having a similar piece made, give me a call on 0844 4128008 or contact us through the website.

 

My last couple of days here in Beijing have been spent visiting a few more Chinese antique suppliers, selecting the final pieces that we will ship in a month or so from now. These were all fairly small outfits, but while the overall choice is not so big at these places there are often one or two really interesting pieces that are out of the ordinary and that are unlikely to be found elsewhere.

Yesterday I spent the morning at the workshop of a lady who tends to specialise in antiques from Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu. She usually has a smallish but good quality selection of painted furniture from Shanxi in central China – large armoires or ‘Wedding Cabinets’ in black lacquer, decorated with either figures from legend (more valuable) or flower vases, birds or butterflies, as well as elegant double cabinets or sideboards. What makes many of these pieces special is that they are in a very original condition, with the original paintings and occasionally the original hardware still intact. The price of these pieces has increased quite rapidly over the past few years as they become less common, but they continue to be some of my favourite items of Chinese furniture.

The Gansu pieces are a little more ‘rough and ready’ in construction than those from Shanxi, usually in chunky pine rather than elm wood, but in many cases still with their early painted decoration. These include old grain buffets with a distinctive black and red lacquer finish, with the once removable boards in the top now sealed and the front panels converted into doors to turn them into more practical sideboards.

Perhaps most distinctive are the cabinets and coffers from Shaanxi province – not to be confused with Shanxi, which neighbours it to the South. Shaanxi is home to the city of Xian – the ancient capital of China during the reign of the emperor Qin and famous for his terracotta warrior army. Often older than the antique pieces from other areas of China, Shaanxi furniture is usually decorated with some wonderful, deep carvings on drawers and doors. One cabinet in particular that I saw yesterday was exquisitely decorated – the carved drawers, doors and side panels all delicately carved and surrounded by contrasting rounded frames in a worn red lacquer. Again this type of piece, particularly one in such good condition and with such refined carvings, is difficult to come by and has a price to match. The pieces tend to be quite deep and cumbersome, so are not always the most practical, but have a character that you don’t find in furniture from any other part of the world.

At the last couple of warehouses that I visited there were again a few pieces that really stood out. Amongst other items I selected an elegant ‘round cornered’ cabinet in cypress wood, with the distinctive tapered profile that distinguishes this design and with delicate dragons in carved relief on the bottom drawers. Another highlight was a beautiful altar table in poplar wood from Shanxi province, again with some superbly worked open carvings on the front panels and apron showing flowers, as well as fruit vines and rats – one of the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and an animal in ancient times seen as a bringer of prosperity.

This China visit seems to have gone by faster than ever but I’m very pleased with all the pieces that we have lined up to ship – I think there is a good and varied selection and I am already looking forward to being able to display some of them in our showroom in Saltaire in a couple of months. I hope to have photos for all the pieces I’ve selected on this trip in the next few weeks so they should be available to view and to order on our website in May.

It’s now time for one last dinner with a couple of my contacts here who helped set up visits with the warehouses today before I head to the airport. I’ll post again soon, hopefully with some further details and photos of one or two of the most interesting pieces from my visit.

James

I arrived in Beijing on Friday evening and woke up on Saturday to sunshine and beautiful blue skies. This time of year is a good time to visit as although there is still a chill in the air the smog and haze that often hangs over the city in the summer months and that so many of us in the west associate with the Beijing is rarely to be seen.

I met up with my main contact here – a lovely lady that I have worked with now for around seven years to source most of our Chinese antiques, and we headed straight off to Panjiayuan. Saturday is one of the busiest days at this enormous covered market, with crowds of people descending on the hundreds of stalls hoping to find a bargain or grab a memento. The stalls range from general bric-a-brac to huge stone statues, with aisles and aisles stretching for hundreds of yards. It would be easy to spend days checking out what each stall had to offer but we tend now to go to trusted suppliers for most pieces, while trying to spot new items that might be of interest. I selected a good number of smaller accessories to ship with our next container of antique furniture – calligraphy brushes in jade and bone, silk embroideries, some more black and white photographs to display in the showroom, decorative tassels and other pieces. We also spent some time checking out all the stoneware that was on offer – rows and rows of pieces from dozens of different suppliers. I picked up some nicely carved stone Buddhas as well as stone ‘foo dogs’ (temple lions) – great as door stops or bookends. After Panjiayuan we went to another smaller indoor market to visit the supplier of many of our silk lamps and to arrange pieces for our next shipment.

Sunday was spent at a couple of antique warehouses starting to choose the pieces that we will ship hopefully around the end of April or early May. It was a long but very productive day and by the end I had selected around fifty items to go on the container. Among them are some beautifully decorated sideboards and cabinets from Qinghai and Shanxi – all in a very original condition rather than being repainted, as well as carved coffers and tables, wooden chests and painted opera trunks. As ever the difficulty is in choosing what not to take. The second warehouse in particular, run by a good friend of my contact, had a large amount of stock of good quality pieces – all sympathetically restored and nicely finished. It was also good to see that, as well as the few hundred pieces that were already available, he had a similar number that had been brought in more recently from the provinces and that are currently waiting to be repaired. I will quite likely end up ordering many of these pieces once they have been restored over the coming months.

Amongst the more regular furniture I chose one or two pieces that are at the higher end of the scale in terms of rarity and quality. As I’ve mentioned before, Shanxi armoires are becoming more and more prized so it was nice to find another in a highly original condition, still with its paintings lacquer and hardware intact. A beautifully carved, large temple cabinet, also from Shanxi , was another special purchase. Unfortunately I seem to always be drawn to the more expensive options and so sometimes have to hold myself back. A wonderful pair of painted Mongolian side cabinets therefore stayed off my list. If only I had seen them five years ago when the price was half what it is now!

Tomorrow and Tuesday will be spent visiting two or three more antique suppliers to select the final pieces for the container, so I hope to have as much success as I did today. Over the next weeks we will write up descriptions and edit photographs of each piece before adding them onto our website, hopefully completing everything around the time the container leaves Beijing. In the meantime let me know if you are looking for a specific piece and I will be happy to share a sneak preview of what we will have available.

First stop on my latest sourcing trip has been Shanghai, and it has been a good couple of days. I met up with Anita, our assitant from the workshop here, yesterday morning and headed off to a couple of the markets, starting with the main one at Yu Yuan. A very popular destination on the tourist map and located next to the famous Yu Yuan gardens, the shops and restaurants here are some of the only old style buildings left in the city (although I believe they have mostly been reconstructed). You can now find over a hundred shops and stalls, selling everything from silks, paintings, Chinese chops and traditional crafts, to bronzes, jade, furniture and Chinese medicine. On top of that you will constantly be accosted by hawkers offering you ‘rolex’ or ‘antique’ – neither one likely to be any more genuine than the other.

However, it is a great place to spend some time browsing and there are still interesting items to be found amongst the more general tourist tat. It’s also a great place to people watch over a green tea as the bus loads of tourists pit their wits against the stall holders for gifts and souvenirs. I picked up a few bits and pieces – brushes and silk items from a couple of the stalls that we have dealt with before. The work of negotiation with these stall holders has been done on previous trips so it is nice not to have to go through the whole time consuming process again to get to a price that both parties are happy with.

After Yu Yuan we went to the other very well know area for antiques and curios in Shanghai – Dongtai Road. This street is again full of small stalls selling all sorts of interesting and unusual objects – copper, bronzes, silks, coins, Mao memorabilia and other collectibles. Several years ago there were quite a lot of genuinely old pieces on display, but these days almost all are fake or reproduction.

Dinner last night was spent with Mr Zhang – the manager of the factory, and his assistant. We had a great time at a Sichuan restaurant that I had not been to before – a huge place, beautifully furnished, which had a stage at one end. Throughout the evening there was various entertainment including the ‘face mask changing’ dance (‘bian lian’) and fire breathing that are traditional to Sichuan opera. Dancers in brightly coloured costumes took to the stage, with the face mask of the central character magically changing many times throughout the performance – think somewhere between Phantom of the Opera, Chinese Circus and Paul Daniels. The food itself was particularly good. Sichuan food is famously spicy but what we had was not overpowering, although Mr Zhang had to ‘filter’ the heat through a bowl of water as he found it too hot for his tastes! A fish broth was excellent and even the tripe and pig’s blood tasted good given the Sichuan treatment!

Today gives me a chance to catch up with a few other things before I fly on to Beijing for the main part of this visit and to select antique furniture for our next container, so more to follow soon.

I will be flying out to China again in just over a week to visit the workshop in Shanghai and then to select more antiques for our next container to be shipped from Beijing. I will have just a few days in Shanghai but it will be good to see everybody there again. I have timed things so that I can inspect all of the furniture that will be going on our container leaving Shanghai at the end of the month – made up of our ‘Classical‘ and ‘Contemporary‘ ranges, as well as around 20 pieces that have been made to order for customers. These are mostly variations on our standard designs but there are also a few more unusual pieces, including a new bed for my 5-year-old son who is very much looking forward to seeing it arrive. We meant to ship this some time ago but never managed to squeeze it onto earlier containers, so at last the endless questions about its arrival will be over!

Being able to see these pieces is always a treat. Normally they arrive into the UK and go straight out to our customers, so we never get to see the finished result of our designs other than photos that our assistant at the workshop takes before they are packed up. There is often quite a lengthy process in making sure that the design and finish are exactly what the customer wants, so it is often with a certain sense of frustration that I see these go straight out for delivery before I have a chance to see the final piece myself.

We have been also been working on one or two new pieces to add to our standard ‘Classical’ furniture range, which I will check when I am over there. Look out for these over the coming months.

After a few days in Shanghai I will then fly on to Beijing to catch up with the guys who produce our ‘Chinese Country‘ furniture and to source more antique furniture and accessories. Each time I go it seems to be a little more difficult to find the real gems amongst the array of less interesting pieces – it usually means widening the search to several workshops and warehouses rather than being able to find a good selection from just one or two suppliers. Some pieces in particular are becoming more difficult to source, at least in an original and well preserved condition. The beautiful painted armoires from Shanxi province that were quite common ten or so years ago are now much more difficult to come by, while furniture from Mongolia is becoming almost as rare as original Tibetan pieces – with prices to match.

Another type of piece that is becoming rarer and therefore more expensive is the old Chinese apothecary cabinet, such as the one shown here from Shanxi. Used by practitioners of Chinese medicine all over the country, these come in many different sizes – I’ve seen some over two metres tall. They are made up of dozens of small drawers, each divided usually into 3 sections. Each section would hold a particular herb or remedy and on the front of the drawer would be written the contents, starting at the top for the first section and going round in a clockwise direction. In a modern western home I admit that they are not necessarily the most practical of pieces (unless you are a serious hypochondriac or have a large collection of bugs), but they look beautiful and have a real charm and a sense of history. We have had a few pass through over the years and have a couple in stock at the moment including a beautiful example from Beijing. The one shown here is another that we have just snapped up ready to go on our next shipment. It is not yet up on our website but details will be available very soon.

As a result of the dwindling supply of good quality antiques, just about all of the workshops in both Shanghai and Beijing are now concentrating more on reproduction pieces. Another interesting development is that an increasing number of them are starting to ship the other way – sourcing western antiques in Europe to sell on to Chinese customers! This seems set to be a growing trend with the expansion of the middle classes in China’s cities.

I aim to update the blog when I am over in China with more details of my trip and of any interesting finds during my visit, so check back soon.

James

Over the past few months we have been busy sourcing a much wider range of smaller accessories, most of which have now arrived and are already available to buy in our Saltaire showroom or on the website. We import these direct with our containers of furniture and antiques from Shanghai and Beijing, mostly pieces that I’ve seen and picked up on recent buying trips. Some are one offs, but there are also pieces that we will continue to hold in stock, along with other items as we develop the range.

Our silver bracelets, bangles and necklaces have proved very popular in the shop. These are hand worked by one of the many ethnic minorities in China – the ‘Miao‘ people, who live predominantly in the country’s southern provinces. The jewellery that they make is beautifully crafted and often very ornate. Much of this is a little too much for western tastes (take a look at our framed print of a couple of Miao children in traditional dress for a great example), but the simpler bracelets, hairpins and earings are wonderful. The larger necklaces may be a little more difficult to pull off at the office party, but look great on a stand as an ornament or framed on a wall. You can already see a selection of the bracelets and necklaces on our website, but we plan to source more in the future, so look out for these in the coming months.

More recently we have also started to stock some wonderful lacquerware and stoneware from Guilin in southern China. The area around Guilin is famous for its stunning limestone formations – making it one of the best know tourist destinations in China. It is also a centre for a particular type of lacquerware – vases and other ornamental pieces in a deep, vibrant red lacquer that is carved in traditional designs such as peony flowers. Along with these pieces the workshops there also produce ornaments in a mixture of limestone and resin – buddhas, ‘Tang’ horses and many more unusual items. Again, you can view and order some of these items online and we also stock them in the showroom.

We have also extended our range of lighting recently to include bronze as well as ceramic based lamps, adding to the very popular silk table lamps and bird cage lamps that we already stock. We plan to continue adding to the collection, and I will be heading over to Beijing and Shanghai again in a couple of months to look for other interesting pieces to ship back to the UK.

To see a large selection of all of these pieces, click onto the accessories section of our website. And don’t forget also to check out some of our smaller one off antique pieces – painted boxes, wooden buckets, food baskets and more.

Our latest container of Chinese antique furniture from Beijing sails into port this evening so all being well we will get our hands on the contents around the middle of next week, when it arrives at our warehouse. In this case almost all of the pieces included on the container are ones that I selected myself on my most recent visit to China, so it will be great to finally get hold of these in the UK.The time taken to finalise the various items of furniture and accessories to be included on the container, organise shipping and then the actual shipping time itself – often around 5 weeks or even more from Beijing, means that it will have been months since I saw these pieces in the various warehouses that I visited.

In the meantime we have photos and details of all the furniture so we have been busy editing these and putting them up on the website over the past couple of weeks. You can now already see and order all of the sixty or so antiques that are coming in, which include some beautiful painted furniture from Shanxi (one of my favourite styles of Chinese furniture and one that I blogged about last time), as well as some quite unique and now quite rare Mongolian furniture. There are also a couple of wonderful altar tables from Shaanxi province in central China. These two pieces are particularly old, with one dating from the middle of the 18th century at a conservative estimate.

Shaanxi, with its ancient capital of Xian – home of the terracotta warriors – developed a quite distinctive style of furniture and the pieces that survive and are on the market today tend to be from the early 19th century and earlier. Most of these pieces are either side tables, altar tables or coffers – used for storing valuables. What they all tend to have in common are ornate, usually quite heavy carvings on the front. Like furniture from most other parts of China these were normally finished with a lacquer. However the most striking thing about the pieces are the carvings and the rich grain of the elm wood that they are normally made out of. The restoration workshops that we work with will therefore often strip back any remaining traces of lacquer to reveal the beautiful wood beneath and so that the carvings can more easily be appreciated.

As well as the antique furniture and production pieces in our ‘Chinese Country‘ range – several made to order to meet customer requests, the container is also filled with some fantastic accessories. Some of these can already be ordered online but they also include new lighting, ceramics, art, jewellery, lacquer boxes and more that will only be available through our showroom in Saltaire – they should all be here within the next couple of weeks. So if you are not too far away or are passing this way, make sure you pay us a visit to view these in person.

My last post talked about my visit to one of the areas in Beijing where you can view and selected unrestored antique Chinese furniture, with hundreds of pieces from different regions stacked up in warehouses. There were two vast warehouses specialising in the beautiful painted furniture of Shanxi province (see Roger Schwendemann’s blog for a very good article on these pieces), and it is quite possible that the cabinet shown here passed through one of these warehouses at some time in its life, before going on to our supplier to be carefully restored and then shipped to the UK.

Most of the furniture that we ship dates from around the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, as it is difficult now to source older pieces. However we do occasionally come across something that is alot older and this beautiful painted black lacquer cabinet is one such piece. At a conservative estimate this dates from the mid 18th century, but it is most likely older than that – possibly being made at the end of the Ming Dynasty around the mid 17th century.

While it can be notoriously difficult to accurately date Chinese furniture, there are often clues in the lacquer, hardware or paintings and this piece is a good example. The black lacquer here is clearly very thick, built up in several layers most likely over a fabric base to achieve the desired smooth, shiny finish. Where the lacquer is worn, the wood beneath is clearly aged – you can see particularly along the side frames and at the feet. There is also crackling visible in the lacquer – something that occurs naturally over time and, although not impossible, is very difficult to fake. The brass hardware on the doors would once have been bright but over the years has turned to the dull, blackened colour that you see here. Again a good indicator of age, this is clearly a result of oxidisation over time rather than any modern day chemicals.

Lastly the paintings in this case give a clear indication of the period that the cabinet was first made. Their original brightness has faded, muted through exposure to the elements, but in this case it is more what they depict that shows the cabinet’s age. The frames of the cabinet are decorated in gold with a scrolling dragon head design – a specific motif that was typical of furniture from the late Ming period but not used during the later Qing. Even more significantly, the characters depicted in the paintings on the front of the doors are all dressed in clothing typical of the late Ming period, rather than the later Qing. While this does not necessarily prove that the paintings were carried out in the earlier period, there is no reason why an artist during the Qing dynasty would have painted characters in Ming dress. The new dynasty, founded when the Manchus successfully expanded south into China and eventually sacked Beijing, quickly went about enforcing their regime – symbolised by the edict in 1645 that all Han Chinese should shave the front of their heads and wear their remaining hair in a ‘queue’ on pain of death. It would therefore make no sense for an artist in Shanxi to decorate a cabinet such as this with characters from the earlier dynasty if working under the Manchus.

Finding this piece on my last visit to China was a real highlight as good quality furniture from Shanxi province is becoming incresingly hard to find. It has been sympathetically restored by the highly skilled craftsmen at our antique supplier in Beijing and remains in a very original condition. For one lucky new owner it will represent not only a beautiful addition to the home but a little slice of Chinese history.

Airport again, but this time half way home. The past week or so seems to have flown by as I’ve hardly had a chance to draw breath in between getting around the various markets, suppliers and workshops out here. It has been a great trip though. We will be soon be stocked up again with plenty of smaller pieces that help to add extra interest to the showroom, including a few new items – pottery and textiles that will be sent over with our next container. As well as that I’ve been able to pick out some superb pieces of antique furniture which we will ship soon. These all need to be photographed so it will be a few weeks before they are up on the website but there are some real gems. I’ve lined up far more than we can ship, so as usual it will be a question of prioritising what goes on the container and what has to wait until next time.

I spent Tuesday and yesterday afternoon visiting four more antique suppliers here in Beijing, a couple of which I had visited before but the other two were new to me. One of these in particular had a very wide variety of stock from almost all regions of China other than the south. I picked out some lovely painted furniture from the central province of Shanxi as well as one or two more unusual pieces from Gansu and a few very attractive little boxes. The difficulty is deciding what to leave behind, particularly as certain pieces are becoming more and more difficult to find in good, original condition so there is likely to be only a limited time period when these are still available. It’s a balance between not holding too much stock in the UK but not missing out on certain finds, at least before the prices rocket as has been the case already with Tibetan and to a lesser extent Mongolian and Shanxi pieces.

This morning (or now yesterday morning) was a little different. I met up with Roger Schwendeman, an American who has been in the Chinese antique business in Beijing since the end of the 90s and has a wealth of knowledge about the subject. You can check out his very informative blog here. I went with Roger to one of the two large markets in the city that sell unrestored antiques. These are both made up of many warehouses, run by the people who go out and source antiques from the various regions of China and bring them back to Beijing. They then sell them on to the many workshops who restore them for retail or in most cases for export. Each warehouse tends to specialise in furniture from a particular region, with the people who run them being from those areas – so there are a couple that are filled with Shanxi pieces, another that specialises in walnut furniture from Gansu and so on.

Looking around these spaces it was reassuring to see that there are still large quantities of pieces available, much of which is still of good quality – two hundred year old cabinets with the original lacquer, paintings and hardware, or beautifully decorative altar tables with their carvings almost entirely intact. However, I understand that several years ago there were far more of these warehouses. For example, rather than just one or two Shanxi specialists there were about twenty. This is partly indicative of the increasing scarcity of some furniture but is also likely to be down to other factors. Demand has reduced in some parts of the world, although seems to be holding up in the UK. Also it is becoming more time consuming and expensive to source antiques from the countryside – again because they are more scarce, and this type of work is less attractive to workers in the provinces who see easier money to be made in the cities. Not only that but most of the workshops who once specialised only in antique restoration have recognised that their supply is finite and have moved towards reproduction pieces. Interestingly they are also concentrating more time on the rapidly expanding domestic market, although this means a complete change in style as the Chinese are almost exclusively interested in Western style furniture!

That’s about it for now. Once we have some good quality photos rather than the ones I took in the dimly lit warehouses I will pick out one or two of the more interesting pieces that we will be shipping but if you can’t wait until then and are after something in particular then give me a call or contact us on the web.

James