Are priceless artifacts selling for pennies on eBay?

“Hongshan jade objects are being illegally excavated, and the reaction of officials is simply to declare them all fake.” —David C. Anderson

Hongshan, the most advanced culture of the Chinese Neolithic, existed from around 6,500 to at least 5,000 years ago in a Montana-sized area northeast of what is now Beijing. Their riverside villages contained up to 1000 people and were probably connected by networks of paths through forests. They grew millet, raised pigs and cattle and sheep, hunted deer and other animals, fished, made red-and-black pottery, created stone/clay female figurines, worked with bronze, and sculpted art from nephrite jade, agate, and possibly natural glass.

They were the first culture to sculpt jade dragons. In 2017, one of their C-shaped dragons was auctioned for around 350,000 dollars. In 2019, a Hongshan “pig-dragon,” combining a dragon’s body with a pig’s head, sold for 2.295 million dollars at a New York auction. An article in The Value asked if the 5-inch sculpture was “really worth” so much, affirming, “Well, if it is an authentic jade from Hongshan Culture, it is definitely a bargain to buy such a historically significant artefact with US$2.295m only.”

Hongshan jade artifacts are thought to be rare because it’s believed that Neolithic jade carving was not extensive. But they only seem rare because pieces not found on official excavations are dismissed as fake, argued David C. Anderson in Hongshan Jade Treasures (2012). Anderson, a retired physician born in 1940, wrote that “there are tens of thousands of clearly original pieces coming out of China via Hong Kong and increasingly direct from China via eBay, most of which simply could not have been faked.”

Dealers have acquired these pieces from farmers (who have little incentive to contact officials; the farmers who found the famous Terracotta Army lost their land, for example) and grave-robbers, according to Anderson, who since 2000 has been buying Hongshan carvings for “ridiculously low prices” in Hong Kong markets and on eBay. Because his insights remain little known (Amazon has two copies of his book, both for $499), many Hongshan pieces are still on eBay (a search of “Hongshan jade” returns more than 86,000 results) for less than 20 dollars. 

Anderson is probably the West’s leading expert on Hongshan art. Over a decade of research—consulting archaeologists and collectors and artists, inspecting pieces under microscopes, visiting modern Chinese jade workshops, traveling to Hongshan sites—he has identified multiple factors for why some-to-many of the Hongshan pieces that are viewed as forgeries are actually authentic, including:

1. Price. Anderson bought many pieces for under ten dollars, which in many cases is less than the cost of the material required to make them. This seems to indicate the pieces “cost the source nothing to make” and that—since China has a death penalty for tomb-raiding—they’re “being sold as quickly as possible.” In the introduction to Hongshan Jade Treasures—the only book in English devoted fully to Hongshan—sculptor/painter Geoffrey Key asked, “why would a forger spend hours of his time, carving an object out of one of the toughest substances on earth, patinate it, and then sell it on the market for just a few dollars?”

2. Patination (the appearance of a thin layer of color on objects exposed over years) and other weathering. Anderson calls this “the strongest evidence.” Using microscopes, including a scanning electron microscope, he found evidence of weathering “which common sense says could not be faked,” including variable/microscopic hydration, expansion, and softening of jade crystals. Some pieces seem to have been half-submerged in water and/or enveloped in roots, accumulating watermarks over long periods of time. 

3. Process. Binocular microscopy and careful study of digital images showed that Anderson’s pieces were made not with modern machines but most likely with bamboo bow drills and natural abrasives, including iron and diamond. Anderson found hundreds of “glistening” microspheres in more than one of his pieces; analysis by Queen Mary College’s Nanovision Centre confirmed these were tiny diamonds, sourced, Anderson theorized, from a meteor impact crater.

The best-known Hongshan site is Niuheliang, a 5,500-year-old religious complex excavated from 1983 to 1985 by Guo Dashun, who called Hongshan “the dawn of Chinese civilization.” The 50-square kilometer site includes more than ten tomb groups; a three-tiered, pyramidal, artificial hill; a 159 x 175 meter walled platform that may have been the foundation of a large building; and what Chinese archaeologists call the “Goddess Temple”—a semi-subterranean structure containing fragments of female figurines up to three-times life-size, including a life-sized head with inset jade eyes.

Visiting Niuheliang in 2004, Anderson asked Dashun how he found the site. Dashun said a farmer had brought him a piece of jade and showed him where he’d found it. In 2008, Anderson returned to Niuheliang and “personally uncovered a new robber’s hole”—not there in 2004—leading into the largest of Niuheliang’s unexacavated tombs, a mound covering an area larger than half a football field. Anderson’s book includes a photo of Dashun examining the hole.

Dashun was “distinctly unhappy, and phoned the so-called Security Guards, who apparently said, ‘Oh, that’s funny, we saw a hole there first two years ago, and wondered what it was,’” wrote Anderson in his autobiography. A journalist reporting on the estimated 20-meter-deep hole for South China Morning Post wrote that most of the security guards were “elderly farmers,” and that they shared a small house without electricity or water on a corner of the expansive site, which covers more than 10,000 football fields.

A year later, the tomb had been fenced off with barbed wire, “but the damage done inside the mound still had not been explored,” wrote Anderson, who argued that ”most grave sites have been robbed long before archaeologists got there to pick up the scraps,” and that there are probably “grave-robbing syndicates, with police and other local officials in on the take.” 

At some point, Hongshanners began to carve agate, which is harder than jade. In 2019, an agate Hongshan pig-dragon was auctioned at Christie’s for around 60,000 dollars. Anderson has paid as little as $2.99 for agate pieces “through a dealer on eBay, who is at least two places removed from the original source.” An eBay search for “Hongshan agate” returns more than 1800 results, but academic papers and articles on Hongshan art do not mention agate.

Even later in the Hongshan culture, people may have started to carve glass. Anderson discovered Hongshan glass carvings in 2007 in the Hong Kong jade market, where a Mr. Wong sold him a piece for 40 dollars. Over the next few years, glass pieces appeared on eBay for as little as $1.99; today, “Hongshan glass” returns 113 results. Some of Anderson’s glass pieces are seals, with script-looking stamps, which may be among the earliest evidence of China’s written language, conventionally attributed to the Shang Dynasty of 3,600 years ago.

These glass carvings are “by far the most controversial, but also perhaps the most interesting material that was carved by the Hongshan people,” wrote Anderson. “And there is virtually nothing documented about it, nor am I aware of any such items in museums in China.” It’s believed to be “inconceivable,” wrote Anderson, that people 5,000 years ago could have “manufactured glass, especially an extraordinarily hard one whose melting point is extremely high.” According to Anderson, the glass probably came from the site of a meteor impact.

Hongshan Jade Treasures includes photos of around 350 of Anderson’s pieces, including clouds, combs, skulls, masks, little bowls, silkworms, cicadas, fish, parrots, owls, hawks, ducks, salamanders, frogs, dragons, pig-dragons, bird-pig-dragons, rabbit-pig-dragons, bird-pigs, a bear smoking a giant pipe, a caterpillar-butterfly, a piece that (depending on the angle viewed) shows a fish or two birds or two faces (“the ultimate in Hongshan surreal art”), a “friendly-looking cow ‘god,’” a “grumpy goddess with horns,” a boy playing with a bird, a person doing a somersault, and various reproductive and sexual iconography.

A red glass piece is a penis-shaped pendant. One piece shows a bird having sex with a woman. One shows a man having sex with a pig-dragon from behind. One shows humans having sex. “It is hard to see how such fine and witty pieces of sexual art could be modern fakes, especially since modern Chinese society, on the surface at least, tends to be quite prudish,” wrote Anderson. One piece is “a pixie-like female humanoid figure squatting (in the delivery position)” while seeming to birth a baby from the top of her head.

A collector of Hongshan art is “charged with the important dual roles of preservation and academic scholarship” due to the “denial and neglect of mainstream academia,” wrote Anderson. The denial extends far beyond Hongshan art to all of the Neolithic, from Europe to China, I’ve found. In the West, we’re taught that civilization began around 6,000 years ago. Cultures before this time (like Old Europe, where writing developed 7,500 years ago, and Çatalhöyük, where mirrors, wood vessels, and metallurgy were invented) are only briefly, if at all, mentioned in history texts and popular history books, like Sapiens (2014).

People in and around China were nomadic hunter-gatherers until probably around 9,000 years ago, when they began to live in permanent structures and grow millet. The earliest use of jade occurred in the Xinglongwa culture, around 8,000 years ago. A Xinglongwa dragon-shaped stone-pile may be the earliest extant depiction of the dragon. Like seemingly all Neolithic cultures, Xinglongwa was peaceful and egalitarian, with little-to-no social stratification. 

Hongshan, which developed out of Xinglongwa, seems to have been China’s last partnership civilization, free of war, sexism, and classes. Their similar-sized households showed no sign of wealth accumulation or political leaders. They did not make weapons of war, and none of their art depicts war or warriors. A spiritual people, their lives seem to have revolved around the worship of nature as a female deity, similar to other Neolithic cultures to the West. Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas called this cross-cultural deity The Goddess.

A 2020 paper on Hongshan jade stated that “most of their themes and shapes are closely related to nature worship”—an assessment based on the limited number of acknowledged pieces, including merely “more than a dozen jade pig dragons.” The total number of recognized Hongshan carvings, spread across museums and collections, may be under a thousand, while Anderson’s collection alone contains around 2000 pieces.

Admitting that thousands of real Hongshan pieces are on eBay would indicate massive failures in archaeology, museums, auction houses, and UNESCO, the United Nations agency that establishes and protects World Heritage Sites of cultural importance, of which 56 out of 900 are in China. No Hongshan sites are yet recognized—Niuheliang and two other sites are on the “Tentative List”—but grave-robbing likely extends beyond the Hongshan. 

However, I don’t think we should blame mainstream archaeology. The problem seems systemic, rather than specific to one field. Interest in “prehistory”—as the time before 5,000 years ago is misleadingly called—and funding for archaeology is low in our global dominator culture. The SRI Foundation estimates that the U.S. budget for cultural resource management and archaeology in 2020 was 1.4 billion dollars, 0.18 percent of the military budget. 

At least 500 Hongshan sites have been located. The largest excavated residential site (Weijiawopu) contained 103 houses. An unexcavated site called Nasitai spreads over 1.5 square kilometers, and was “probably a metropolis of the time,” according to a 2023 article in China Daily. Sites like Nasitai, which have been found but not yet explored, seem especially susceptible to grave-robbing. 

”True academia has been forced underground, and into the realm of the collector-scientist,” wrote Anderson. But academia is paying attention. A 2015 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on climate change in northern China cited Anderson’s book as its reference for this sentence—“In particular, the level of Hongshan jade-working is highly advanced and unique in early China.”

Despite anticipating “considerable opposition” from people with “professional reputations and publications to protect,” and collectors who’ve “spent large sums of money at auction,” Anderson foresees a time when China will realize that real Hongshan pieces are on the open market for low prices and start to buy back them back. By then, “it will of course be too late to collect, unless you have a very deep pocket indeed,” he wrote.

In a 2015 investigation by Al Jazeera titled ”China: Faking It,” a journalist brought an elderly, veteran collector to an antiques market near Hongshan. The collector examined a piece—being sold by a man seated on a low stool, his items laid out on a blanket—and said, “This could be real.” The seller said he’d gotten his pieces from local farmers. In a store in the same market, a modern reproduction of a Hongshan pig-dragon cost 200 dollars.

The journalist brought a hidden camera to a workshop where a client had brought in a Qing Dynasty vase, asked for it to be copied, bought the copy for 80,000 dollars, and auctioned it for around 450,000 dollars, keeping the original. The forgers said this happened regularly. At another workshop, a man said he might make up to 200 copies of a piece to perfect a forgery.

“China: Faking It” serves as evidence that Hongshan forgeries would not be sold for 20 dollars on eBay, especially since the demand for Hongshan pieces on eBay seems very low.

In my view, it ultimately doesn’t matter much what wealthy collectors are buying and selling. It matters more that the whole Hongshan oeuvre be acknowledged and examined by historians and other researchers, so that all of us—collector or not, Chinese or not—can learn more about the ancient partnership culture, so different from our own. 

Hongshan artists avoided the tacky garishness of later Chinese sculptures (ultrastylized dragons and lions), the formulaic rigidity of Buddhist iconography (which had strict regulations on posture, gesture, proportion, clothing, etc.), and the grim bleakness of war-inspired art, like the lifesize Terracotta Army—8000 soldiers, 670 horses, 130 chariots, and thousands of real weapons—that was buried with Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 206 B.C. 

A full conception of Hongshan art teaches us that, in addition to loving nature, Hongshan people were not sexually or creatively repressed. Even their standardized forms, like the pig-dragons, which are unique to their culture, come in a large range of variations. They hewed to nature, featuring natural color variations in their carvings. Playful surrealists, they enjoyed complexity, combining multiple ideas into one piece. Anderson sees “great humor” in their work—one piece shows a man holding up his own exaggeratedly large head. Their art is uplifting, celebrating the diversity of life, the enchantment of sex, and the wonder of birth.

Hongshan ended some time after 5000 years ago, due probably to climate change, which by 4200 years ago had altered most of their homeland from forest to desert. With the founding of the first Chinese Dynasty 4,070 years ago, Chinese society grew increasingly stratified and violent, with chronic war becoming widespread and normal.

For more on Hongshan and the Neolithic period, read Tao’s essay “Partnership Before Sexism and War.” Buy Hongshan Jade Treasures direct from David C. Anderson here.

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References

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