Page 118 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

and surrounded by auspicious sea creatures of some size but, in hierarchical
fashion, always smaller than the dragon. 6 In other cases, a horizontally
oriented dragon may stride above rolling waves, but as the principal motif,
the dragon appears on the vessel itself rather than on the cover. 7 In early
Qing examples, as illustrated by this censer, dragons often appear on the
cover, amidst the clouds, while sea animals romp in the waters below, the
playful creatures having little in common with the serious beasts on Ming
ceramics and bronzes. Reflecting the Qing-dynasty interest in cosmological
symbolism, Qing decorative arts give new importance to the pairing of
complementary opposites, manifested here in the combining of clouds and
water, symbolizing heaven and earth; dragons and phoenixes, symbolizing
yang and y/n, the male and female forces of the universe; male phoenix
(feng) and female phoenix (huang), symbolizing the duality of life; concealed
dragon claws and exposed dragon claws, symbolizing esoteric and exoteric
knowledge; open dragon mouth and closed dragon mouth, symbolizing
'ah' and 'om/ the Buddhist mystical syllables that reverberate through the
universe, thus animating it.
Introduced to Chinese art from Tibetan Buddhism during the Yuan
dynasty, borders comprising squared lotus petals with straight sides,
flattened tops, and rounded corners frequently appear on fourteenth-
century architectural monuments 8 and blue-and-white porcelains, 9 not to
mention on the daises of deities pictured in the frontispieces of fourteenth-
10
century, woodblock-printed Buddhist sutras. The motif graces Buddhist
sculptures 11 and sacred texts 12 of the early Ming period, and it often orna-
ments the borders of imperial porcelains from the late fourteenth and early
13
fifteenth centuries onward. A Wanli-period carved red lacquer bowl, dated
to 1589 and now in the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection, has above
its foot a panel of rising lotus petals that would seem to be the ancestor
of the panel on the Clague censer. 14 Such lotus-petal borders are a stan-
dard feature of Sino-Tibetan Buddhist sculpture of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. 15
During his visit to the Clague Collection on 7 June 1992, Yang Boda,
Deputy Director Emeritus of the Palace Museum, Beijing, noted that there
are numerous Kangxi-period censers of identical shape, decoration, and
style in the Qing Palace Collection, confirming this censer's date of manu-
facture. He further commented that such censers exhibit considerable
variation in size and surface color.

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