Page 251 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Plate 27.6 Pendant in the form of a pelican, c. 1440–60, Franco-
Burgundian. Gold set with ruby, height 2.95cm, width 3.58cm.
British Museum, London, Franks Bequest AF 2767

Highland and lowland, steppe and plain, were turned into
pleasure parks like the gardens of paradise,
Forage herbs became tulips, stones became rubies and pearls,
grass became elixir, and the ground became gold. 34

The Castilian ambassador Ruy González de Clavijo (d.
1412), in Samarqand in 1403, is our source for the
observation that Timur ‘wore on his head a tall white hat on
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the crown of which was displayed a balas ruby’. For the
Mughal rulers of India in later centuries, rubies were a key
sign of their Timurid ancestry, and they explicitly sought out
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inscribed gems, several of which survive today, in Iran. Plate 27.7 Antonio Pollaiuolo (1433–98) and Piero Pollaiuolo
(1443–96), Portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, c. 1471. Tempera and
The flash of red attracted the eye in other parts of the world oil on cypress panel, height 65cm, width 42cm. Galleria degli Uffizi,
too at just this time. In South India the Tamil text Florence
Līlātilakam, written at Travancore between 1375 and 1400,
innovatively uses the simile of rubies and coral in place of then to the ‘last gasp of the pax Mongolica’ in an early
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the more usual ‘pearls and coral’ (maṇi-pravāḷam) to describe 15th-century era of peace in Central Asia? Gold was
the interlacing of Sanskrit and vernacular vocabularies in certainly a colour sacred to the Mongols, with a
elegant prose. cosmological as well as a material significance; to what
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In Europe during the same era, as well as the possible extent did its use in combination with red stones become a
case of the ‘Black Prince’s Ruby’ (if not definitively broadly understood visual language of grandeur and status
medieval), noted above, rubies (which may also in fact be in a range of post-Mongol polities? And do red gems perhaps
spinels) glitter prominently in the earliest surviving crown have a specifically Ming cosmological significance, in terms
of an English queen, the so-called ‘Bohemian’ or ‘Palatine’ of the ‘five phases’ cosmology of which colour symbolism
crown, attested as part of the English crown jewels in was just one aspect? At first sight, this is perhaps an
1399. They appear in a gold-and-ruby Burgundian badge attractive line of argument. It is still quite common in the
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showing the pelican in her piety (Pl. 27.6), as well as on literature to see a claim to the effect that red was ‘the
the breast of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza symbolic colour of the Ming dynasty’ and hence red gems ‘a
(1444–76), whose favourite red gems all had their own metaphor of royalty’. But the contemporary evidence for
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nicknames (Pl. 27.7). this is in fact sparse. The idea that dynastic succession, the
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It is perhaps not leaning too heavily on the evidence to overthrow of one house by another, was governed by the
postulate the sense of a gold-and-gems aesthetic order of the ‘Five Phases’ (or ‘Five Virtues’, wu xing 五行),
combination (with rubies, the rarest of the four major gem such as water, fire, etc., and hence that each dynasty had ‘its’
types, particularly prominent) to set beside golden textiles as colour, certainly carried considerable credence in early
one element of a pan-Eurasian high elite material culture (to Chinese political thought. But by the Northern Song period
set alongside, for example, the taste for fine horses, hunting (960–1127) this had been comprehensively dismissed by
hounds and trained raptors). Is such a gold-and-rubies intellectuals such as Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 (1007–72), and the
aesthetic in the Chinese context (and this must of necessity theory’s role in explicit dynastic legitimation seems to have
be highly speculative) an inheritance of a specifically rapidly diminished; it does not appear as an argument in
Mongol glamour or, to put it more conservatively, one which any of the official Ming sources authored by the Confucian
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at least owes its dissemination to the Mongol hegemony, and elite. There is however some evidence that fire (and hence

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