Published: Filippo Salviati, Radiant Stones: Archaic Chinese Jades, Myrna Myers, Paris, 2000, no. 110.

China, 4^th-3^rd century BC. Finely carved, the tiger carved with its back hunched and legs bent in a running posture. Its body neatly decorated in comma spirals with finely incised hair along the spine. Pierced through the back for suspension. The partly translucent stone is of a greenish-brown hue with icy inclusions and alteration along the head and hind legs.

Provenance: From the Sam and Myrna Myers Collection. Sam and Myrna are first generation Americans, who shared a taste for collecting beautiful objects of art. On a trip to Ascona, Switzerland, the couple stumbled into a small antique shop which started their journey of collecting antiques. When Sam Myers was sent to Paris by his law firm in the mid-1960s, he and his wife Myrna became so enamored with the city that they decided to make it their home. There, over the course of 50 years, they built an extraordinary art collection, and in 1976, Myrna opened a gallery in Paris specializing in Asian art. Their collection spans a wide range of precious objects from Chinese jades, ceramics, textiles, Indian ivory carvings, to Japanese clothing and lacquer, some of which was exhibited in the Kimbell Art Museum. Part of their collection was sold at Sotheby’s, London ‘Two Americans in Paris, The Collection of Sam and Myrna Myers’, on 4 November 2021. The couple also worked together with jade expert Filippo Salviati to create one of the most outstanding jade collections globally and authored several books on jade, including ‘Radiant Stones’ (2000), ‘The Language of Adornment’ (2002) and ‘Genèse de l’empire céleste’ (2020).
Condition: Very good condition, commensurate with age. Ancient wear, signs of weathering and erosions, microscopic nibbling to edges, minor encrustations. The stone with natural fissures, some of which may have developed into small hairline cracks.

Weight: 11.4 g
Dimensions: Length 6.1 cm

The tiger, called hu or laohu in Chinese, is among the most recognizable of the world’s charismatic megafauna. Originating in China and northern Central Asia, the tiger was known to the earliest Chinese, who likely feared, admired, and respected it for its strength, ferocity, and regal bearing. Though its precise symbolism in Shang times (c. 1600–1046 BC) remains unknown, the tiger doubtless played a totemic, tutelary, or talismanic role. By the Western Han period (206 BC–AD 9) the tiger was regarded as the “king of the hundred beasts”, or baishou zhi wang, due to its power and ferocity and especially to the markings on its forehead which typically resemble the character wang, or “king”. In addition, not only did the tiger figure among the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, but it gained a place among the auspicious animals that symbolize the four cardinal directions—the white tiger, or baihu, of the west, the azure dragon of the east, the vermillion bird of the south, and the black tortoise of the north.

Literature comparison:
Compare a related jade pendant of a mythical beast with a similar form, 7.5 cm long, dated to the Warring States period, once a part of the Qing court collection, in the National Palace Museum, illustrated in The Complete Collection of the Treasures of the Palace Museum: Jadeware, Hong Kong, 1995, p. 192, no. 160.

Auction result comparison:
Type: Related
Auction: Christie’s Hong Kong, 29 November 2022, lot 2731
Price: HKD 277,200 or approx. EUR 34,000 converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing
Description: A jade tiger-form pendant and a jade phoenix-form pendant, Xi, c. 3^rd century BC.
Expert remark: Compare the related style albeit modeled in a different posture. Note this lot is comprised of a pair.