Chinese Silver Marks: Export Silver and Pseudo-Hallmarks

Chinese silver marks are maker and retailer marks, not assay marks, and no Chinese export piece ever passed through a British assay office. It was never tested under the British system and never struck with a lion passant, a date letter or an assay office town mark. Anything that looks like one of those on a Chinese piece is an imitation.

That sounds like bad news and is not. The marks still identify the workshop, and on the best pieces the workshop is the whole story. What you typically find is a maker's cartouche carrying the firm's initials or device, often with Chinese characters beside it, and a small group of English-looking punches arranged to reassure a Western buyer.

The silver itself is real. Most export silver runs at about 900 parts per thousand, occasionally as high as 950, which puts it just below sterling at 925 and well above anything plated.

A handful of firms account for most surviving marked export silver, and the initials are the fastest way in.

• WH, Wang Hing. The most prolific of the makers, based in Canton with a later presence in Hong Kong. The mark is WH, sometimes in a shaped cartouche and occasionally with a butterfly device, often alongside the word WANG HING in capitals, a Chinese character and the number 90. Quality varies across the output, but the best Wang Hing work is exceptionally fine, and the firm supplied Tiffany and Co.
• LW, Luen Wo. A Canton maker with a later Shanghai branch, whose work is common in dressing table and desk pieces.
• TC, Tuck Chang. A Shanghai maker found on hollowware and presentation pieces.
• HC, Hung Chong. A Canton maker; the business is recorded as established in 1892.

Named makers are considerably more desirable than unmarked examples, which is exactly why initials have been faked. Treat a crisp set of initials on an otherwise crude piece with suspicion.

Export silver was made for Western buyers, and Western buyers had been trained by a hallmarking system to look for a row of small punches. Chinese workshops supplied that expectation.

The result is a set of punches that reads, at a glance, like a British hallmark: a figure in a shield, a letter, a device. Read closely, the resemblance breaks down. The letter does not belong to any office cycle, the animal is not a lion passant in the heraldic sense, and the group has no fineness mark of the British kind.

What replaces the fineness mark is usually the number 90, meaning 900 parts per thousand, or sometimes 95. If you have a piece with a bare 90 beside a set of initials, you are almost certainly holding Chinese export silver rather than an English piece with a damaged mark.

This is not forgery in the modern sense. It was an open trade convention, well understood at the time, in the same way that plated goods in Britain and America carried crowns and shields without claiming to be assayed. For that parallel habit see crown mark on silver.

There is no date letter system to fall back on, so dating is done from the object and the trade record around it.

• The trade ran from about 1785 to 1940, peaking between 1850 and 1910, and the treaty port system that followed 1842 is what put Hong Kong and Shanghai at the centre of it.
• Form is the best clue. Early export work copies Georgian English shapes closely. Later work, from the 1860s onward, leans into applied dragons, bamboo, prunus and pierced panels, which is what most people picture when they think of Chinese export silver.
• Presentation inscriptions are gold dust. Regimental, club, racing and shipping presentation pieces are often dated in the engraving, and the date is usually close to the date of manufacture.
• Retailer marks from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore shops sometimes appear beside the maker, and directories can place those shops in time.

If a purchase depends on the attribution, a specialist in Chinese export silver is the right check. For the metal itself, XRF testing at a jeweller or assay office measures the silver content without damaging the piece.

Chinese marks are often struck on curved surfaces and under applied decoration, which makes them harder to photograph than a flat English base.

Find a position where the mark sits flat to the lens, even if that means propping the piece. Light it from one side at a low angle so the punch edges cast shadows, and do not clean first. Take one frame filled by the marks, one showing where on the object they sit, and one of the whole piece. Photograph it and the app identifies it, and the initials and any Chinese characters in your own photograph are what you match against the makers above.