eBay vendor antiques143 has on offer a round box decorated with dragons and signed by Lao Tian Li 老天利 . Once upon a time this box had a companion - as antiques143 sadly relates,
"I wish I could show you the other box I had from this maker. It was imperial yellow and of much better quality, but it was stolen by an antique dealer who had come to appraise several items of mine.It was similar to the one I have listed now, only a little larger and with a greater quality of workmanship. I have not seen another that matched its beauty. It had been in my collection for more than 20 years."
Going through my files, I notice I've harvested from the internet quite a few pictures of pieces with Lao Tian Li signatures. Is anyone interested in seeing these? Should I do a blog post about them?
Presumably this was printed sometime after 1981, as it features an award won in that year. Thought it might be useful for those trying to discover what varieties of cloisonne were made in the 1980s. Plus, a fascinating video of the Beijing Enamel Factory showing just how difficult it is to create cloisonne enamel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6dDTR8SPu8 (Skip to 3:00 to avoid the puppet stuff intro) Check out the differences in the staff clothing, work areas, and technology between the 1980s brochure and the 2013 video.
Trying to match cloisonne motifs to what appears on cloisonne beads leads to some interesting detours. This mark shows up on a cloisonne pieces that have some distinctive characteristics, all of which seem to pre-date the style of JingFa factory products. When were they made? 1920-30s? 1950-60s? And where? Beijing? Tianjin? Somewhere else?
Another figural jar from private collection of E.N.
Base of figural jar
Facebook Group Chinese & Japanese Cloisonne, March 2025
A millefleur vase, Facebook group Chinese & Japanese Cloisonne, November 2023
A vase I own
Screenshot posted to Facebook group Chinese & Japanese Cloisonne, March 2025
UPDATE: An alert member of the Facebook group Chinese & Japanese Cloisonne discovered this website that seems to solve the mystery of this mark! Excerpts from the articles below, but of course click the links to read the entire documents. https://nzchinasociety.org.nz/edgar-snow-on-indusco-gung-ho/
In 1938, the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives (Indusco) movement was set up by Rewi Alley, Nym Wales and Edgar Snow. It was introduced to help the people of Free China work for the war effort and be educated to survive during the catastrophic war with the Japanese and is still in operation today under the name of ICCIC (see below).
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Below are Edgar Snow’s comments from the book, on the ‘Gung Ho or Indusco’ movement, as well as his recollection of Rewi Alley.
“Among non-party patriots of all descriptions, real faith persisted that a progressive government representative of varied opinion and worthy of the people’s spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice would emerge during the war. Out of such faith grew the most original and hopeful experiment of the ’united front’ period – the Chinese Industrial Co-operative organisation (Gung Ho, or the Work-Together Movement, Indusco). It provided work and an education for tens of thousands of Chinese and proved indeed to be the forerunner of what ultimately became the largest producers’ co-operative movement in the world.
“I vividly remember the setting in which the idea was born. The war had passed from Shanghai on the Yangtze River Valley. Behind it lay the ruins of a nation’s industry. Except for the tiny oasis of the International Settlement, everything for miles seemed a desert of rubble, charred timbers and twisted iron, beneath which many bodies still lay. Over 70 per cent of China’s pre-war industry was concentrated in a little triangle bounded by Shanghai, Wushi [Wuxi] and Hangchow [Hangzhou]. By early January 1938, all that plant had fallen to the Japanese, for whom the immobilization of China’s industry and labour was a main objective of “total aggression”.
“Indusco set up several hundred small factories, workshops, power plants, transports and mines. We had our own training schools, war veterans and war orphans vocational centres, printing and publishing houses, lunch rooms, clinics, nursery schools and character-study schools for illiterate worker-members and their children. Indusco became a reasonably sound prototype of a democratic, co-operative society, producing a wide variety of goods of war value. Some mobile co-operative units functioned far behind the Japanese lines in North China.
The triangular Indusco sign appeared far and wide; some mobile co-operative units functioned far behind the Japanese lines in North China. Here two customers bow to each other in front of a co-operative savings bank displaying the Indusco symbol.
History of Gung Ho
The Early Years
The Gung Ho movement has a long history. In 1938, Rewi Alley, Peg and Edgar Snow, and some other friends in Shanghai together set up an International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. At that time, the Japanese invaders had already captured most of China’s industrial cities and looked to occupy all of China in the near future. Rewi’s plan was to establish small producer cooperatives throughout China that could contribute substantially to the war effort at the same time as they advanced the ideals of cooperation that Rewi and many others espoused as the hope for China’s economic future.This became a nation-wide civil movement with the biggest influence in China Gung Ho movement history.
As field secretary Rewi Alley regularly travelled thousands of kilometres, often by hitch-hiking or bicycle.
The Chinese name for “China Industrial Cooperatives” was Zhongguo Gongye Hezhoushe. This was abbreviated as Gong He (the first characters for the two words for “Industrial Cooperatives”), or “Gung Ho”, as it was then written. Rewi adopted this as the logo for the movement, and it can be translated as “working together”, which was a perfect slogan for the movement as a whole.
Suzanne at her Etsy shop MaisonettedeMadness is offering a necklace with some fascinating Chinese beads:
The clasp and style of findings are very Miriam Haskell.
The openwork disk bead in the center can be seen in this similar collection of pendants from an online auction:
Note the openwork bead second from the left in the bottom row. Three similar pendants were combined in another 1930s necklace with a chain similar to Suzanne's necklace.
UPDATE: a recent eBay sale featured one of these Haskell-attributed necklaces with a charm cap similar to the one in Maisonnette's, plus other interesting cloisonne beads, including 4-toed dragons:
