Could this really be? She blinked at the small, delicate porcelain for a long, wheeling moment.
Tilted on its side, surrounded by white silk, it seemed to be one of the Chenghua chicken cups. But that would be impossible. Those delicate little Ming masterworks, made in the late 1400s for the Chenghua emperor, were some of porcelain’s highest stars. Whole careers were devoted to them.
She ticked through the whereabouts of the eighteen chicken cups known to still exist. The last one to sell at open auction had fetched almost four million U.S. dollars. There were eight in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two in Beijing. Five of the cups were in museums in the West: three in London, one at the Met, and one in Geneva at the Collections Bauer. The last three cups were in private holdings. None of these could change hands without her knowing it. So what was this? A nineteenth?
That’s beyond imagining, she thought, but then she looked at it again, so impossibly, radiantly beautiful.
Up from her world of memory came something the seventeenth-century scholar Shen Defu had written of these cups: The five colors are the crown of the past and the present. True, she thought. The absolute centerline hues of the doucai palette.
She picked it up. A featherweight. It felt perfectly balanced. She was going to have to take it outside in the natural light. She had to really see it.
Her heart was pounding as she packed the cup back in its nest and latched it, carried it outside with her square of felt. It was three steps down to the grassy court. Wind frilled the acacia trees along the side.
She unrolled the felt and lifted the cup out again. She held it to eye level. Fantastic. The proportion, the shape and balance were just what they ought to be. It was a feeling more than anything else, but it was sure and deep and it ran like a stream of light all through her: The cup was right. The porcelain had that vanilla-toned, off-white warmth that came from the clay used during the Chenghua reign, never dead white, always soft, alive. It was an effect almost impossible to reproduce, and this cup had it right. A very good sign.
I’m not going to turn it over yet, she thought. Everything was moving at half speed. She was aware of a ringing in her ears. Was it the nineteenth cup, or something else?
She looked at it critically. None of the obvious signs of forgery was present. First of all, it was not a copy of any single other cup. Fang gu artists were usually faithful to one prototype. They rarely thought to combine aspects of different cups. Because many gorgeous full-color photographs of the well-known Dreyfus cup had been published when it changed hands at auction a few years before, this cup had been the recent favorite. If she were to see a fake chicken cup, she’d expect it to copy the Dreyfus. Yet this one didn’t. Another thing: The painting was sweet, easy-not overdefined as most modern copies were.
She turned the cup over. For a lurching instant her whole consciousness was a digital player on skip. The characters were perfect. Da ming cheng hua nian zi. Made in the great Ming Dynasty, reign of Chenghua.
Or was it a replica from a subsequent reign? The Chenghua chicken cups were so exquisite that they began to be copied almost immediately. She canceled each possibility in her mind. It was not a fang gu made in the Kangxi reign, because the clay in use then was a purer, clearer white. And it was not a copy from the Yongzheng reign, because copies produced then always seemed to reflect the harder Qing palette. The colors on this cup were soft and blurry-edged, following the Ming sensibility.
Chenghua. But how could it be Chenghua?
She half closed her eyes now. She lifted the cup and ran her fingers along the rim to feel how it bloomed out to the lip-yes, there, it was right. Then she did the same thing around the base rim. Though unglazed, it would have an inimitable smoothness if it was almost six hundred years old. My God, she thought, touching it. It had the exact worn quality, the softness of centuries.
Now she needed the loupe. She went all the way around the circular painting, the chickens and rocks and rosebushes. She played with the instrument to get just the right tilt. Then she went in deeper, below the luminous glaze, under the softened fields of color. Here she found the infinitesimal kiln faults, the bubbles and pocks, the singular DNA of every work in porcelain. And then higher up, on the surface tension of the glaze, the near-microscopic wear marks. These were little stilettos of touch, of abrasion, of the movement of air itself. They accumulated. It took centuries. They should appear natural and completely random. She squinted. Unbelievable. They did.
Then she put the loupe in her pocket and held it away from her eyes and looked at it.
Oh no, oh no. Something was nagging at her.
It was the blue wash of color on the rocks. Too forced.
She turned the cup in the light, looking at it again. It was too good to be true. The painting was masterful, the hens and chicks and fronds of grass glowing, effortless… and yet the blue on the rocks was too hard. She had to admit it.
She looked again at the mark and period on the bottom. This also was a little too perfect. Most of the true Chenghua cups had fainter reign marks. On the underside of the Dreyfus cup, as a matter of fact, one corner of the mark had washed out almost completely during firing. This one was so clean. Why hadn’t she seen that before?
She hit bottom with a crash.
My beautiful Chenghua cup, she wanted to wail. She held it up to the light. Real? Fake. Fake. But it was absolutely fantastic, so graceful, so fine. She held the piece out again, fifteen or twenty inches from her eyes. It might be the best fake she’d ever seen.
She packed it up again, feeling a scraping little fishhook of fear. One fake was enough to start rending the fabric of a deal like this. Through the tear would slip other fakes, and others behind them. It was impossible to have this many great pots. There must be fakes. Lots of them. More of them.
Ones she had already missed.
She went back to the first crate and started again. A Song celadon crackleware bowl. Then a Xuande stem cup, a Yongzheng incense burner, a Wanli plate. She was going too fast. She couldn’t stop herself.
“Xiaojie,” she heard from the door. Miss. She half turned. It was the driver.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Sorry.” She looked at her watch. It was past time. “Deng yixia,” she said, Wait a moment, and quickly packed up the pots to make them safe for the night.
Back in her room she opened her laptop and dialed up the photos of the little cup, merged the images to move the three-dimensional model around. The emperor himself had commanded this design, drawing his inspiration from the twelfth-century Song painting of a chicken. She turned the image, looked at it from each side. If she could see the emperor with his cups, if she could feel his desire, she’d understand this fake better. She would know this near-perfect thing more fully.
To see the Chenghua emperor, she had to go into the deeper level of her memory world, the one that was accessed by completely letting go of the present. This was the realm of memory in which pieces of the past showed themselves. Whether it was imagination or erudition or some mix of the two she didn’t like to ask. It just happened.
To do it, she went back to her silence. She picked out her hearing aids and felt the instant blooming of an empty space. She was alone again. She cleared her mind. She willed herself through the gates and into her imaginary examination yard. She walked down the central avenue, then into the east quadrant. The streets of her world were empty. There were no people. There were sounds-leaves and wind and skating pebbles-but never a human voice.