Once upon a time, anyone who wanted a Qi Baishi painting could send him a letter enclosing a sum of money with a request for his work, and he would draw one and send it back, with size and complexity depending on the amount sent. My secondary school art teacher said (it was 1963), that during the early 50s, 50 Hongkong dollars used to be a reasonable amount to send, at the time equivalent to about RMB120, about two months' average salary in China, but a small amount in Hongkong. Today one would expect any Qi Baishi painting to be worth 20 years of average salary.

I bought the painting shown above in a shop in Hongkong, at an amount much much less than 20 years salary. Is it real or fake? I certainly cannot tell. I recognize the butterfly as being similar to one shown in a picture produced in a book on Qi Baishi, except that in there the butterfly was flying next to some plum blossoms; what is a butterfly doing here next to fruits? I also recongize the basket of loquats as being similar to several pictures of fruit baskets, though with candleberries and other things, and there is a basket with loquats but with a very crudely drawn basket.

I know it is drawn, not printed, since printed colour pictures, when viewed through a high power magnifying glass, would reveal that they are made up of many coloured dots. The Taiwan Palace Museum produces high quality reproductions of selected items from its collection, of such high quality that viewed with the naked eye, it is virtually impossible to know that these are copies. Most art museums have sovenir shops that sell reproductions of their own prize collections, but the Taiwan Palace Museum does it on a large scale; not only are there two sovenir shops on site, just in the international airport waiting lounge alone there are three (yes three) branches, including one very large branch that includes a sizable exhibition hall. I assume it does enough business to justify the rent and salary, even though only outgoing and transit passengers could go to those shops.

I once owned several small Qi Baishi prints; they used to be widely available, some mounted on scrolls ready for hanging, some on rectangular backing paper so that they require to be framed before they could be displayed on a wall. I made my own frames, quite shoddy in workmanship but good enough for the pictures to be hung up. After a number of job changes and house moves, I no longer have them and do not remember what I did with them.

In any case, what I have now is a lot better. Real or fake, it is a treasure.