CHINA: AE charm (30.71g), 49mm, Lei Ling "Daoist curse charm", lei zou sha gui jiang jing / zhan yao chu xie yong bao / shen qing feng / tai shang lao jun ji ji zhi ling which translates as "God of Thunder (Lei) clear out and kill the ghosts and send down purity / Behead the demons / Expel the evil and keep us eternally safe / Let this command from Lao Zi be executed quickly" // eight trigrams with inscription qián kan gèn zhèn xùn lí kun duì around, engraved into eight-sided floral shape, XF, ex Dagmar Kringlebotten Collection. The large characters at the extreme right and extreme left of the obverse are not Chinese, but rather Daoist "magic writing." Regarding the very large character on the left, the upper half is "magic writing" for the Chinese character lei, which means "thunder" and refers to the "God of Thunder." The lower part is "magic writing" for the Chinese character ling, which means "to order." According to the consignor, who is the great-grandson of Dagmar Kringlebotten, she was born in Norway in 1891. Her father passed away when she was 4 years old, and when she was 9, her mother was remarried to a man named Lars Sørensen Hasle, who had already built a career in China. Dagmar followed her parents to China and landed in Woosung (Wusong) on November 16, 1900 after a 7-week journey on the SS Kiautschou. From there, they took a train to nearby Shanghai. In her memoir "En verdensborger ser tilbake" (1979), Dagmar recounts that as her family arrived in Shanghai, the city was still in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion. Its streets were flooded with antiques that soldiers had looted from official residences and later sold to small shops. They eventually settled into a comfortable life at No. 2, Kung Ping Road (near todays Gong Ping Road Ferry on the Huangpu River), in an ornately decorated home with several Chinese servants. It is unknown how Dagmar began collecting Chinese coins, but her interest might have been sparked by her familys acquaintance with another Norwegian ex-patriot, Johan Munthe (1864-1935), who was a high-ranking customs official in the employment of the Chinese government and an avid collector of Chinese art. In 1908, Dagmar returned to Norway via the Trans-Siberian Railway and brought home the collection that she eventually passed on to her descendants.
