Insightful Tips on How to Avoid Misleading Chinese Facsimile

Not quite the same Quality is a fair comment I think.....!

Marijn, it was about time a post about this showed up. These fake Shunga books are selling for ridiculous prices on almost all auction platforms, from eBay to CATAWIKI, Invaluable, etc., and the quality varies also, but mostly, they are trash. There are some give aways: first, they all have the characters 春宫图 on the cover. Second, they have very thick pages, made of a material/board that's modern. Third, they have the corners filed/rounded and the edges also rounded to look as if worn-out. The Chinese are masters at faking and copying, both with quality and lack of it, and these are poor quality (I have seen one or two I would not mind having,) but mostly all are garbage. They are being produced en masse these days, as are fake Japanese netsukes, etc. This is a fait-divers and does not pertain to Shunga per se, but some "fakes" out there are amazing; a traditional Chinese painting on so called "rice paper" or "xuanzhi" i.e., Xuan paper, can be lifted double and remounted. And voila, you have two "originals" so to speak. I am not sure there are any master mounting artisans alive today capable of this feat though (but back in the 1980s there were some at Rong Bao Zhai in Beijing when I visited their workshop...) These, and woodblock printed reproductions are amazing, but I've never seen any 春花 woodblock prints out of China. Their erotica seems to always be hand painted.