Riding the wind of rebirth

The next morning, Zhou Zhi and Mai Xiaomiao drove to find Elizabeth, and brought three sandwiches they had made for the three generations of grandparents and grandchildren.

Elizabeth also took out the remaining four pieces of short porcelain, and they all went to the bank together.

"Ms. Elizabeth, you don't seem to have had enough rest?" Zhou Zhi looked at Elizabeth through the rearview mirror and felt that she seemed a little haggard.

"I didn't sleep all night." Elizabeth smiled bitterly, "I was thinking about my past with Tom and the future of my children... With this money, our situation will be much better."

"You are a respectable person." Although Elizabeth did not say what happened to the children's parents, Zhou Zhi could see that Elizabeth should have been raising the two children alone in the past few years. The teacher's pension is considered good in the United States, but it is different with two more mouths to feed.

However, judging from the fact that she supplemented the family income through needlework, incense and candles, she was also doing everything she could to make her children's lives better.

And judging by Rose and Martin’s personalities and manners, she had educated her children well.

"Then you can rest for a while, and we will call you when we arrive?"

Elizabeth looked out the window and just shook her head slightly.

There is a bank in the county, but it opens relatively late and ATMs cannot handle services like check cashing, so everyone has to wait for the time being.

Zhou Zhi made a temporary wooden box yesterday, used foam to make partitions inside, and put the four bottles in it. While waiting, he also put Elizabeth's four short porcelains in it and admired them.

Now the sunlight has become brighter, and the light green color of the two porcelain pieces, the Tongluoxi and the Apple Zun, which only stood out in the dark, is no longer visible. The two objects now show a rich red color, a bit like the color of blood, but with a little dullness like pig liver. If you look carefully, you can find that this red color is not uniform, and you can slightly distinguish clustered spots. These circular spots are composed of many small colored dots visible to the naked eye. They are relatively rich, while the color of some gaps between the spots is lighter.

The changes in color in darkness and sunlight, as well as the different shades of color on the surface of the object, are caused by the Kangxi kidney bean red glaze and the glaze spraying process. They are extremely difficult to imitate, so much so that even now, Lang Hong can be imitated almost perfectly, but imitations of kidney bean red glaze are still obviously fake at first glance.

I verified my vision again in the sunlight, and the thing was wide open.

Among the remaining two pieces, one is a Taibai Zun and the other is an ink box. Among the eight pieces of porcelain, five are Suanguang utensils, one is a Panchi bottle and Suandui Sculpture, while these two pieces have the rolling process.

The embossed porcelain is a kind of porcelain with patterns embossed on the brocade ground outside the main body or partial decoration. The craftsmen of Jingde called it "baked flowers", the north called it "embossed road" or "carved ground", and the palace had a better-sounding name for it - icing on the cake.

This kind of porcelain is complicated and tedious to make. After the porcelain body is made, a fine needle is used to carve out hidden patterns on the porcelain, and then it is glazed and fired. The fired porcelain will have faint patterns under the glaze, which is more delicate and exquisite than the mold embossing process that has been popular since the Song Dynasty.
By the Qianlong period, this technology had reached its peak. Craftsmen first used glass white as the base color, and then used silk cotton to evenly apply a layer of color materials, such as red, yellow, purple, carmine, etc., on the white body to form a brocade ground. Then, a tool shaped like an embroidery needle was used to carve tiny concave patterns, such as phoenix tail-shaped curling grass, on the brocade ground. The white body can be vaguely seen from the concave patterns. Finally, the boneless method in traditional Chinese painting techniques was used to paint and render colored porcelain with decorations such as flowers, birds, landscapes, or opening lights. The characteristics of this kind of porcelain are that the yin and yang of the picture are prominent, the light and dark are distinct, the three-dimensional sense is strong, the color is soft, elegant and bright, which enriches the large color blanks on the porcelain and makes the content richer. Therefore, it got such a nice name "icing on the brocade" in the palace.

The Taibai Zun is a hemispherical vessel with a small outward-slanting mouth on the top. Its shape is also suitable for the palace craftsmen to saw off the mouth of the Zun after it is damaged and transform it into a water pot for continued use. The mouth rim after the transformation is often wrapped with gold and silver for protection. Therefore, there are actually two types of cowpea red Taibai Zun handed down from generation to generation, one with a mouth and one without. The latter often appears under the identification name of a water pot.

The quality of the two pieces of porcelain is not as good as that of the Tongluo washbasin and the ink box. Half of their area is light pink, and the rest is the standard color of red cowpea. This pink and light red mixed with cowpea red is closer to the color of baby's skin, becoming "baby face".

Baby noodles can be divided into two types: uniform and uneven. Both of these pieces of porcelain are uneven. Fortunately, they represent the rolling process from coarse to fine, which can be regarded as restoring the value.

Although only half of the color is shown, the exquisitely patterned ink box has a dragon pattern in the center, and a vine-shaped lotus and foreign flowers on the outside as the background. The Taibai Zun has round windows on all four sides, and each round window is composed of abstract cloud patterns and dragon patterns, highlighting the royal style.

All eight pieces of porcelain were very exquisite and without any damage, which made Zhou Zhi very satisfied. This was because this type of porcelain, especially the lightweight ones, could easily be bumped during the preservation process. Especially if it was collected like Elizabeth did, many precious porcelains were destroyed in the process.

It can only be said that these eight pieces of porcelain were lucky to be rescued in time by Zhou Zhi, otherwise they would have been in ruins in another ten years.

The bank staff arrived late, but fortunately they reviewed the check quickly. This may be related to the Western habit of using this thing as a means of payment. Soon the money was transferred to Elizabeth's account.

Elizabeth still felt as if she had just had a dream, and she was worried that she would wake up before the money arrived. She finally breathed a sigh of relief when the transaction was completed.

Zhou Zhi thought for a moment and handed Louise's business card to Elizabeth. "If you don't need this money right now, you can look for more reliable investment opportunities and buy some stable financial products. This is Lily's mother's business card. She is a senior executive of Collins Bank. If you need anything in this regard, you can contact her."

"If, I mean if, one day in the future Ms. Elizabeth wants to transfer the pair of Benba bottles, she can also contact me through Lily's mother." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "I will consider purchasing them at the market price."

"Thank you, thank you." Elizabeth thanked the two of them profusely.

After sending Elizabeth home, Zhou Zhi and Mai Xiaomiao rushed to Laixiju. Today they would start the most important step of repairing the famous painting, which was to continue to add ink marks.

"Why are you late today?" Weng Wange asked, "The film crew has already arrived, but since they didn't wait for you, they went to shoot some more footage."

"I'm really sorry. I participated in a charity sale over the weekend and found something. I visited the owner yesterday and he agreed to transfer a set of porcelain to me." Zhou Zhi excitedly put the wooden box on the table: "You are all experts, so it's a good opportunity to show it to everyone." (End of this chapter)