CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

just 11.8 by 8.4 centimeters — corresponds in number
and in kind with the three jiasha and two
women's garments mentioned in the inscription
and that their slightly amateurish gold thread embroidery
of clouds, lotus flowers, and man characters
is the work of Empress Wu herself. 2
The crystal sarcophagus exhibited here 3 was
found inside a silver-gilt casket dedicated by Emperor
Yizong in 871 CE to receive the Buddha relic;
the silver-gilt casket was itself protected inside
another of iron, and placed in a secret compartment
beneath the rear wall of the innermost chamber.
The crystal sarcophagus, in turn, held another,
smaller coffin, made of greenish jade, which held
the fingerbone relic, a hollow phalanx of soft yellow
bone, slightly smaller than the white jade one
found in the eight-fold set of caskets (see cat. 164).
Two precious stones adorn the top of the crystal
sarcophagus, and an openwork gilt bronze plaque is
affixed to the higher end, but the smaller jade coffin
is left entirely unadorned, save for its dais, also
carved from jade.
The earliest surviving Chinese reliquary
deposits, dating from the Northern Wei dynasty
(386-534 CE), were usually contained within a
small stone chest, roughly cubical in shape. By the
early Tang dynasty, however, relic containers had
assumed the shape of the Chinese coffin, with a
rounded lid, higher at one end than the other. The
innermost coffin might be of gold, inside another
of silver or silver-gilt, inside one of bronze or stone.
Two such silver and silver-gilt coffins were found in
the Famen Monastery deposit, one of bone within
the gilt-bronze stiipa (cat. 161), the other made of
jade in another iron casket inside the marble
lingzhang of the middle chamber. They contained
the remaining two fingerbone relics. From their
style, it seems likely that these coffins were made in
the eighth or the ninth century — before 874, when
the deposit was opened and closed again for the
last time. This cannot be the case with these made
of crystal and jade, which are of truly exceptional
quality and which would have been regarded in
China as more precious than gold.
While we cannot reconstruct in detail what
happened on each of the occasions that the relics
were brought out of the crypt and transported to
the palace (to be returned, normally, three days
later) one must imagine that new offerings, and
very possibly new containers as well, were added
each time. The tiny jade coffin may have held the
principal relic, and both it and the crystal sarcophagus
were perhaps once enshrined within the giltbronze
pagoda, inside the Ashoka marble stupa, in
the innermost chamber of the crypt. By 874, only
some thirty years after the disastrous persecution of
Buddhism under the Huichang reign (842-845),
the time had come for the principal relic 4 to be
given its own miniature pagoda of solid gold, inside
a splendid new set of caskets, and accompanied
by a vast array of gold and silver, glass, lacquer, and
ceramic objects. The casket that held the crystal
sarcophagus is adorned on its lid and four sides
with forty-five images of the Vajradhatu, or Diamond
World Mandala, 5 representing the latest Buddhist
47 1 | FAMEN MONASTERY AT FUFENC