Page 421 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

142

Jade monster mask with bi disk

Height 18.2 (7'/ 8), width 13.8 (5'A),
depth 0.7 ('A)
Western Han Dynasty, second century BCE
From the tomb of the King of Nanyue at Xianggang,
Guanzhou, Guangdong Province
The Museum of the Western Han Tomb of the
Nanyue King, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

The large monster face of this jade supports a
1
disk to form a door handle. (Such handles were
employed on furniture as well as buildings.) This
example is unusual in being made of jade, although
a similar jade monster face with a fitting for a
ring (but lacking the ring itself) was found in the
vicinity of Maoling in Xingping county, Shanxi
province. 2
Both jades resemble an earlier famous bronze
piece from Yi county in Hebei province on which
two felines in high relief weave in and out of the
surface of the face (similar creatures embellish the
ring). The three-dimensional effects of the bronze,
however, give way in this jade to flattened scrolling
representations of the horns or crest of the beast;
an elegant openwork feline creature flanks the right
side of the face and was, perhaps, balanced on the
left by another (now lost); a bi disk with a pattern
of small relief knobs substitutes for the ring of the
bronze.
Both the bronze and the jade recall the famous
taotie faces that were common in the Shang and
Early Western Zhou periods (fifteenth to tenth
centuries BCE) but diminished in importance dur-
ing the Late Western Zhou period and the Spring
and Autumn period (ninth to seventh centuries
BCE), only to reappear somewhat abruptly in the
fifth to sixth centuries BCE on numerous mold and
model fragments found at the Jin state foundry at
Houma in Shanxi province. A fragmentary model
for a bell (Beijing 1993, fig. 72) shows the design
on one of the most magnificent of the decorated
remains. This mask would appear to be a revival
of the ancient taotie, but details suggest otherwise:
tigerlike stripes decorate the nose of the central

420 E A R L Y I M P E R I A L CHIN A