China
Out of context: Reply #18
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- BuddhaHat0
An excerpt from Paul Midler's 'Poorly Made in China', on the subject of the cultural origins of counterfeiting:
“Emperor Qianlong, who ruled for most of the eighteenth century during the Qing Dynasty, had been admiring his collection one day when he noticed a particular item. It was a small jade cup said to have been made during the Ming Dynasty, which lasted from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. While he liked the piece, there was something about it that caused him to doubt its provenance.
He called for one of his top artists to take a look and issue his professional opinion. The artist, who also served as the emperor’s curator, looked at the cup and declared that he had good news and bad news. The bad news was that, while the cup had been done in the Ming Style, it was actually a fake. The good news was that he could identify the artifact’s creator. It was, said the curator, the work of his own grandfather.
The curator’s grandfather had been a masterful copier. He knew now just how to make the jade cup in the Ming style, but he also understood how to make it appear genuinely old, as well.
Learning that the piece was a fake did not upset the emperor at all. Quite the opposite, he was impressed, and he praised the piece. He also complimented its creator for having done such a skilful job. So many others created copies, the emperor noted, but few were as good as his work. The emperor complained that other rushed the job, and could, therefore, not be called artists.
It is hard to imagine the head of any state looking at an imitation and lavishing such unbounded praise, but that is what Qianlong had done. The emperor even had a special box commissioned for the jade cup, which he saw as a model of sorts, and on the box he had inscribed a kind of treatise on the art of counterfeiting.
American business leaders and politicians who have pushed for increased intellectual property protection in China over the years have failed to acknowledge the cultural origins of counterfeiting. It is now just that counterfeit products are tolerated in the country - they are revered.”