Page 66 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

ACH CLAIMING A STRAIGHT, VERTICAL, OUTER WALL, a curved
cavetto, and a flat face, the two halves of this small, circular, covered
Ebox mirror each other. The decorative scheme on the cover features
a growing orchid with twin blossoms and a lingzhi fungus with two branches.
Gilded, the decorative elements rise in low relief against a ground of
hexagonal diapers with double-Y markings on their interiors, the diapered
ground worked in ungilded but darkened metal. A narrow, raised border
separates the central medallion from the gilded walls of the curving shoulder.
The outside vertical walls of both cover and box have a single band of linked
squared leiwen inlaid in silver wire in a plain ground. On the box, the gilded
walls of the cavetto curve downward to the ridge-like footring that encircles
the wide, flat base. The rectangular mark in the center of the base has six
intaglio seal-script characters in two columns; a single sunken line borders
the mark, the gilded ground of the mark contrasting with the otherwise plain
base. The interior of both box and cover are undecorated. With its cover
removed, the box exhibits an in-curving lip - cast separately, inserted, and
anchored with a touch of molten metal - that echoes the curve of the cover,
that assists in securing the cover in place, and that is designed to protect
the contents of the box from gusts of wind. Thick cast walls make the box
heavy in proportion to its size.
Called a xianghe (literally, 'incense box' in Chinese), this small covered
box was a container for powdered incense and was originally part of a set of
bronze incense implements. (Although some circular covered boxes served as
receptacles for cinnabar seal-paste, boxes with in-curving lips were almost
invariably for incense, especially bronze ones in the Hu Wenming tradition.)
By the Yuan and Ming periods, the five implements of the incense set com-
prised a censer, a small covered box for containing the incense, a flat-bowled
bronze spoon, a pair of chopstick-like bronze tongs, and a vase for holding
the spoon and tongs when not in use. The spoon was used in preparing the
bed of ash - preferably from wood of the wutong, or firmiana, tree - in the
censer to receive the incense, and the tongs were used in manipulating the
incense within the censer. Although only one complete bronze incense set
is known to have survived intact from the Ming - now in the Royal Ontario
Museum, Toronto - such sets often appear in paintings and in decorative arts
motifs of the period. 1
The incised intaglio mark on the base of this box has six seal-script
characters in two columns reading Yunjian Hu Wenming zhi (Made [by] Hu
Wenming [of] Yunjian), indicating that the box was made by the most
famous bronze caster of the late Ming period. History records little about

1 10 C H I N A ' S R E N A I S S A N C E IN B R O N Z E