Page 88 - Marchant Ninety Jades For 90 Years

四 45. Pendant in the form of a goose, hong, with head turned back resting on its wings, forming an aperture for attachment, with archaic-

十 style scrolls on the underside, neck and tail, fine detail to the feathers and eyes, the stone pure white.

五 2 ⅛ inches, 5.3 cm long.

Qianlong, 1736-1795.
鵝

墜 • From the collection of Fong Chow, (1923-2012), former curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

白 • A similar goose, dated Song/Ming, from the Guan-fu collection, is illustrated by James C. Y. Watt in Chinese Jades from Han to
玉 Ch’ing, An Exhibition Held at Asia House Gallery, New York, 1980, no. 82, p. 97, where the author notes, ‘The pose of this bird
is reminiscent of the very early stone weights of Mesopotamia. Whether there is any connection over such a vast gap of time and

乾 distance is still to be proved. The pure translucent white jade, which has the appearance of the flesh of a lychee fruit, as opposed
隆 to the opaque ‘mutton-fat’ white jade of the early eighteenth century, is more commonly found in the thirteenth to fifteenth

centuries’; another is illustrated by Maggie Bickford in The Crawford Bequest, Chinese Objects in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island

Fong Chow School of Design, no. 12, p. 44; yet another is illustrated by Robert P. Youngman in The Youngman Collection, Chinese Jades from

Neolithic to Qing, no. 90; a further wrapped goose, in similar pose, is illustrated by Fu Ying Rong & Yang Jing in The Poly Art

Museum’s, The Exhibition of Jade Carvings from Overseas Collections, 2011, no. 10, pp. 26/7.

• Terese Tse Bartholomew writes in Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, no. 7.28, p. 192, that the goose, hong, like the mandarin
先 duck, ya, mates for life and is thus a motif associated with weddings. It decorates the rank badge of civil officials of the third
生
舊 grade. As a harbinger of good news, it is an emblem of the Chinese postal flag. This association derives from the story of Su Wu,
藏 who was held captive by the Xiongnu in the second century BCE. He managed to inform the emperor of his location by tying a
letter to the leg of a wild goose that was on its way back to China; eventually he was rescued.

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