How to Determine the Age of Chinese Antique Furniture

John Rogers: Hi I’m John. YuQing Zhao: I’m YuQing. John Rogers: Welcome to our continuing series on antique Chinese furniture. Today we are going to be talking about how you obtain the age of this pieces and frankly it can be hard. Personal other and things you can’t look at, style is one of them. The style of Chinese furniture is virtually on change and can be reduce. The second you can’t tell by way of construction because the construction of Chinese furniture has been virtually the same over 500 years except for very, very modern furniture which is made with plywood, screws and nails and that’s will be immediately obviously. Third, you cannot tell necessarily by way of the furnished because Chinese furniture and that the furnished was very crackled and old. But there are some ways applying a good detective and knowing something about age and YuQing is going to tell us how to that. YuQing Zhao: Yeah there are two ways to tell old piece of furniture within 50 year bond, the one thing is how much restoration it has. When it has more I means it’s older but that’s not means more variable but if a piece of furniture has a broken leg and replace later on it you see the connection of the old and new and that means this leg has been use, has been warn a lot and has two broken to use now and have to replace it that means that pieces are probably over a 100 years old that has been use for many years and the other thing is the where the tear. If you pull out a drawer you see underneath it has a deep where underneath the drawer it means this drawer has been pulled out and push back in a lot of times and this is a very typical mark in the show how old this piece if it is really deep, deep part in underneath there you see this is a probably over a 100 years also. If its little bit wear and tear not as deep than this like 50 years something, to see the doors and to see the same thing if you open and shot a lot and the door frame will show some marks for you to tell how many times they’ve use this and how old this piece is basically. John Rogers: And one last thing that we’re going to show you which we find interesting is this store, this store is from this furniture that will over 100 years old but YuQing is going to tell us why the store has some additional interest, YuQing? YuQing Zhao: Okay the front let say this is a very old, this door is to fit from this furniture, original color, original hardware and you turn this over and turn this around and we see some original paintings from the inside and in center that’s interesting part is one of the painting as painted cardboard with locker and John you have some hotel guess what? John Rogers: Yes, they paneled probably have the picture of this or one of the eight immortals. During a time of the Cultural Revolution though mount restore was trying to get rid of those myth so many of the home owners in order to be politically correct painted over with red paint in such figures. Thank you so much for watching our videos, we hope you enjoy them and will be most interested in your comments. YuQing Zhao: Thank you.