Rare Vietnamese Silver Dolphin Tea Strainer at South Coast Antiques

Vietnamese Coin Silver Tea Strainer at South Coast Antiques

 This is a very interesting piece we got in the shop a while back.  It is a silver tea strainer.  There are several unusual features about this item, a few of which are apparent and a few which take a little time to unravel.  First of all it is a coin silver piece made in what is now Vietnam.  That alone makes it somewhat uncommon as few of them were made and fewer still made it to the U.S.  More unusual yet is the route it took to get here, but that is for later.

Vietnamese Coin Silver Tea Strainer at South Coast Antiques

Vietnam has always had a number of silver smiths, although they generally made works for wealthy locals and for items for export to British India.  This piece was made during the French colonial period of southeast Asia, which ran from the 1880s to the mid 1950s.  This piece is marked “MY NGHE VM, HANOI, HTX.TINH HOA A.S.X., 0.900” and weighs just over two and a half ounces.  What we now know as Vietnam was broken into two areas called Annan in the south and Tonkin in the north.  The French made Hanoi the capital of Tonkin in 1902.

I date this piece to being from around 1910 to 1930 or so based on the fact that French Indo China (and later Vietnam) was involved in a series of civil wars, rebellions, invasions, communist states and the like from the 1930s to circa 1975.  During this period I don’t expect that occupying Japanese and later the communists would have allowed a western export luxury good trade in Hanoi.

The quality of work shows great expertise in engraving and chasing on this piece that does not appear in later pieces from Vietnam, so I think it must be from the middle colonial period.  This piece is a highly orientalized baroque style dolphin with a swinging silver basket above the dolphin’s mouth.  The dolphin is held by the tail with the body to the side and the tea is poured from the tea pot with the tea passing through the strainer before the tea make it to the cup.  Any tea debris is caught by the sieve.  When you are done pouring the dolphin body is swung under the strainer, catching any spare drops before they can fall onto your fine linen tablecloth.

Detail Showing Location Soviet Mark Vietnamese Coin Silver Tea Strainer

at South Coast Antiques

Now comes “the rest of the story” …  There is one small additional mark found on the edge which is a tiny lozenge which bears closer scrutiny.  The mark has a capital M followed by a star with a hammer and sickle inside and after the star is the number 875.  This mark is a from the Soviet Union era and was used starting first around 1959.  Now the question comes as to why this piece was marked decades after it was made with a Soviet assay mark. 

Detail Showing Marks on Vietnamese Coin Silver Tea Strainer at South Coast Antiques

 The answer might lie with Soviet – Vietnamese relations since WWII.  The USSR has been infiltrating China and Southeast Asia since the 1930s and after the Second World War, provided support for rebellious parties chafing under colonial administrations.  When Vietnam was officially partitioned in the mid 1950s, the north became a communist state with Hanoi as its capital.  I won’t go into the whole story of Soviet Cold War in Vietnam, but at least that amount of back ground is necessary to understand why there would be a later stamp from another country on a Vietnamese silver item.

Detail Showing Soviet Mark on Vietnamese Coin Silver Tea Strainer at South Coast Antiques

The Soviet assay stamp would only be applied if it were sent to the USSR with the intention of resale or later export.  All Soviet silver goods are marked with a distinctive stamp indicating the place assayed and the purity of the silver.  Now this piece is already marked as being 900 silver, but the Moscow assay mark shows a purity of only 875.  The reason behind this must be the fact that the Soviets still used the fractional value system left over from the Czarist era and hence no stamp for 900, only for the next lower value of 875.  The next higher stamp is 914 under the Russian system, hence the difference in valuation.

Why did the Soviets have a vintage Vietnamese tea strainer in Moscow?  Perhaps it was part payment for the material and weapons provided by the Soviets to North Vietnam for decades.  It also might have been an item that would be been sold in elite party-only stores in Moscow.

So this is a lot of text for such a little piece of silver, but that is the charm of collecting.  You learn a little geography, a little history, a little politics, and a little bit about the manufacturing process.  This is why collecting is so contagious – there is something there for everybody.