Some in the Hong Kong trade say that as much as three-quarters of antique ceramics are fake. The highest risk items are the Ming and Qing dynastypolychrome enamelled wares, often on offer in shops on the Hollywood Road. The best fakes come from Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, home to the former Imperial kilns. Most production is now automated, but the artisans are heir to a tradition that produced much of the work they are forging.
Visitors say they have seen painters working, apparently to order, from old Sotheby’s catalogues. The reported charge ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, far less than the hundreds of thousands or even
millions some items fetch. Jingdezhen’s forgers have a crucial advantage: their raw material, nearby deposits of high-grade kaolin, is exactly the same one used for much of the best Song, Ming and Qing porcelain. Thermal luminescence tests are accurate but expensive—at least $500—and there is limited capacity (the most trusted is Britain’s Oxford Authentication, which has an office in Hong Kong).
However, it is rumoured that even these tests have been circumvented with injections of radioactive material. Jingdezhen first became prominent during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), when it produced a still-renowned qingbai (“blue-white”) monochrome white porcelain. Its heyday was probably the first 200 years of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when it turned out the Imperial “blue-on-white” ware that is today the best-known porcelain in the West.
Jonathan Napack, November 2000