CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

carved jade object. The silver box is decorated
with low relief patterns, very similar to those in use
in Iran under the Achaemenids and Parthians; a
wreath pattern of V-shaped bands around the lip
of the lid and the bowl indicates borrowings from
a Hellenistic or Iranian source. Such a piece was
clearly a rarity and a valuable one at that. 3
Like many jade vessels of the Han period, this
box resembles lacquerware of the late Warring
States period and the early Han period (in particular,
third-century lacquers from Yutaishan, Jiangling,
Hubei province). 4 These lacquer forms were
borrowed from the south and imitated in jade to
provide the owner with sumptuous pieces suitable
for an elegant afterlife. That jade vessels were modeled
after lacquer forms, rather than after bronze
ritual vessels (such as the hu and ding that survived
into the Han period), suggests that lacquerware
itself was prized in its users' daily lives. JR
Jade vessels are exceptionally rare. A few have
been found in the tomb of Liu Sheng (cats. 129-
137). Others were discovered in a small storage
chamber in a tomb belonging to one of the Chu
kings at Shizishan (present-day Xuzhou) in Jiangsu
province. 2 (The tomb was ransacked at an early
date, and it is likely that the vessels recovered constitute
only a portion of the tomb's original jades.)
The jades of the King of Nanyue's tomb are exceptional,
both in their abundance and in their quality.
Several points testify to the value of this particular
vessel to its owner: it seems to have been stored
in the head section of the outer coffin (perhaps for
the use of the king himself), and it was found together
with a number of other objects of evidently
exceptional value — the beaker with the bronze
basin (cat. 148), a jade rhyton, as well as the king's
seal (cat. 138) and pectoral. The mending of a break
in the lid — by means of bindings or rivets passed
through paired holes — is additional evidence of
the object's value. (The holes may have been drilled
originally to attach ornaments, now lost; the drilling
may in fact have caused the crack.) Finally, the
presence of an unusual silver box in the main
chamber indicates the value associated with the
1 Excavated in 1983 (D 46); reported: Guangzhou 1991,
1:202-205, fig. 133.
2 Shizishan 1998.
3 See Pruch 1998, 262 - 265.
4 See in particular the box illustrated in Hubei 1984,
color pi. 2.
429 TOMB OF THE KING OF NANYUE