Yen Yen fencai vase

[Stan]

Hi Peter, here is a Fencai decorated vase, it is 49.9 cm tall,  the Gentlemen that I bought this from said he has had it for over 40 years, the one that I have has ears and the porcelain is thiner, this also has age and the colors are not as bright as the one with ears, I think this could be Guangxu, I think there is a cyclical date, could you tell me how old it is and what you think, I will post 10 photo's, thanks for viewing.

[Stan]

Here are four more photo's.

[Stan]

And here are the Last two photo's, thanks for viewing.

[peterp]

The cyclical year given is 1927/1987. Judging by the age signs it could be the former. A shop with one unreadable character is mentioned as seller or maker: "??? ?"

Maybe this is not a baluster shape. To me it looks more like a variation between baluster and a phoenix tail vase (some call it a yen yen vase in English, it seems).

[Stan]

Thanks Peter, I would have thought a little older but you can't dispute a date, thanks again for your expertise.

[Stan]

Peter do you know what the two red symbols mean at the top, and could you tell me what mark it is that could be a seller or maker, there was one mark that had dried food or something on it I washed it off and took better photo's of the marks.

[Hmm]

Other guesses what the character could be would be ?.  The other guess would be ?, but that doesn't make sense to me.  Looking at a grass script dictionary, ?, looked kind of similar, to how old masters such as Wang Xizhi and others would have wrote it.

As to the red symbol...  Could be ?, maybe ?, not sure what the second character is.  ??

[Stan]

Thanks Hmm, it is all Greek to me.

[peterp]

Stan, painting style and hairdo all would correspond to the 1920s.

The red characters on the neck?  Auspicious characters, never a mark. I can see Yang and Ji, the left one being sheep/goat. Ji means auspicious, thus read from right to left it means 'auspicious sheep'. Presumably pointing to the year, see http://www.chinese-antique-porcelain.com/chinese-zodiac-signs.html.

Thanks for the additional picture. It is easier to read now.
It says "Produced by Yongfengsheng-ji, Tianjin (i.e., Tientsin, the port city). ???? - now that the characters are larger one can see that the second character is another one than I thought, and the third one is written in a somewhat simplified or compressed manner. The last of the four "?" means it is a business. This is a known producer of the early republic.

[Hmm]

I think Peterp is definitely right about the name. 

If you search "???? ? ??", on baidu, there appears to be some pieces from the same company. 

How did you figure that out?  The whole "?" part is missing from the ?, and the ?, looks like it's missing the two ? on the top.  Of course it all makes sense though.  The meaning "Eternal Richness" sounds a whole lot more auspicious than the nonsensical characters I came up with haha.. 

[Stan]

That is great, this will be a very good vase to keep for awhile, thanks Peter.

[peterp]

To Hmm:
The traditional character ? is simplified in different ways in everyday writing, Japanese and simplified Chinese. But here it is still recognizable.