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during his reign. He had over 30,000 jades in his collection when
he died and about 800 of his more than 45,000 poems refer to the
subject of jade, offering descriptions of the beauty of jades, and
records of the quarrying and crafting of jade, quotations of textual
passages on the subject and critical commentaries. The Qianlong
conquests of Dzungaria in the late 1750s gave China direct access
to the jade producing area of Khotan (Hetian) in today’s Xinjiang
province. This coupled with the ability to mine jade at source resulted
in much larger chunks of jade being made available to the craftsman,
and makes the mid-Qing dynasty a much more likely date for these
exceptionally large animals.
Qianlong was one of the great aesthetes of the Qing dynasty. His
tastes were demanding and he reorganized the jade and other craft
workshops in the imperial city so he could keep a better eye on them.
James Watt in his catalogue Chinese Jades from the Collection of
the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 1989, p.75, says relatively large
sculptures of horses and buffalos were carved in Suzhou in the late
Qianlong period and even later, at a time when jade was available in
quantity and in large chunks. He wrote of a large jade water buffalo,
formerly in the jade carvers’ guild of Suzhou, which was now in the
Suzhou museum. The size and magnificence of these large animal
carvings is at the same time a pointer towards the work of the Qing
period which saw the fullest development of carving on such a scale.
A general conclusion about the dating of these monumental
jade sculptures is that perhaps there were two periods for their
manufacture. The grey-green jade ones might have been sourced
Chinese Jade Throughout the Ages. Victoria and Albert
Museum, l75, no.397, previously in the collection of Somerset
de Chair; image courtesy of the Oriental Ceramic Society
from somewhere other than Khotan during the late Ming period and
perhaps can be dated slightly earlier than the majority of buffaloes
in a darker green which were probably a product of the mature
Qianlong period.
THE SELECT GROUP OF COLLECTORS OF THESE LARGER
JADE ANIMALS
The Atterbury buffalo is one of a select group of such larger buffaloes
and horses widely recognised as a special grouping of such jades.
The Atterbury buffalo is a prime example of such jades, weighing in
at a massive 10.5 kilograms. The E.W.L.Atterbury and Henry Tozer
collections were made in England in the 1940s and ‘50s. Tozer
bought the “Atterbury” buffalo for £1,400 in 1949. It was sold at
Sotheby’s on 26th July 1960 by his executors for £6,000 along with
22 lots of Chinese porcelain, and lots of early bronzes, works of art
and jades. (See R. Davids & D. Jellinek, Provenance, London, 2011,
p.424).
Such collections tend to have a direct link to the great Burlington
House International exhibition of 1935 which exhibited over 800
Chinese art objects, and had opened the eyes of many Europeans to
the long history and importance of jade to the Chinese people. This
exhibition was followed up by the Oriental Ceramic Society exhibition,
organised jointly with the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1957,
entitled The Arts of the Ming Dynasty, which included the Atterbury/
Tozer buffalo, (no. 344). The 1975 exhibition of Chinese jade at the
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