Page 446 - Bonhams Chinese Art London May 2013

The Property of a Western Private Collection
西方私人藏品

410 *

A rare large jade-inset gilt-bronze belt hook
Eastern Zhou Dynasty
The belt hook shaped with a wide curving body set with
three jade bi discs beneath a taotie mask with inlaid jade eyes
and surrounded by archaic scrollwork, terminating in a small
chilong head, extensively covered with a heavy verdigris.
21.6cm (8½in) long
£12,000 - 18,000
HK$140,000 - 210,000 CNY110,000 - 170,000

東周 銅鎏金嵌玉饕餮紋帶鉤

Provenance: Christie’s New York, 21 March 2000, lot 181
A Western private collection

來源：紐約佳士得，2000年3月21日，拍品編號181
西方私人收藏

Jade-embellished belt hooks first seem to
appear in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.,
and similar embellishments can be found
on weapons and other personal ornaments
from this period. The interest in gold appears
to have spread to China from peoples on its
western borders, during the late Western Zhou
and early Eastern Zhou, but the choice of jade
would have appealed specifically to traditional
Chinese taste. The form and size of such
belt hooks varied, and often they employed
fragments of earlier jades for their inlay,
increasing the sense of history and individuality.
The combination of precious stones and metals
on a single piece of such complexity and size
would have made it one of the most luxurious
items of adornment in the Eastern Zhou period.

See one example in the British Museum
illustrated by J.Rawson, Chinese Jade from the
Neolithic to the Qing, London, 1995, no.21:1,
and another in the Winthrop Collection,
Harvard University, no.1943.52.61, illustrated
ibid, p.305, fig.1.

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