Inside painted glass snuff bottle with amethyst stopper and attributed to Wang Hsi San - dated Peking 1971.
Size is H=2.258", W=1.983", Th 0.960"
Wang Hsi San was born in 1938 and survived the cultural revolution because of his artistic skills in inside painted snuff bottles.
This bottle has a portrait of the medical doctor Li Shizhen on one side and his 'story' in exquisite archaic calligraphy on the reverse. The calligraphy was translated to read "Li Shizhen is a very famous Chinese doctor of the Ming Dynasty who authored a book on medicine." The front seal is "Far Bar" The rear lower left says "painted in Peking in the winter of 1971". A contemporary Internet translator said "fig 3 says Li Shizhen, a medical scientist in the Ming Dynasty and fig 4 says written in Nanjing in the last lunar month of 1551".
From Encyclepedia Brittanica -"Li Shizhen, Wade-Giles romanization Li Shih-chen, (born 1518, China—died 1593), Chinese scholar of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) who compiled a highly influential materia medica, the Bencao gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), which described 1,892 drugs and presented directions for preparing some 11,000 prescriptions. Completed in 1578, the book was in part a compilation of other smaller works of the same kind. It contained descriptions of 1,094 herbs and 444 animal and 275 mineral substances. Li described such seemingly modern processes as distillation and the uses of mercury, ephedrine, chaulmoogra oil, iodine, and even smallpox inoculation. A revised edition of the work published in the 1600s contained more than 1,100 illustrations."
The bottle was attributed to Wang Hsi San (Wang Xisan??) by Robert Lee of Jin Hing in Los Angeles because of his body of work of other historical figures as shown in the above pictures.
I purchased the bottle from Jin Hing in 1985.
If signed, this bottle would sell for 5 figures. My price is based on what I paid for the bottle.
Shipping charge includes insurance.