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4 1/8 in. (10.5 cm.) long; weight 132 g
Dr. Johan Carl Kempe (1884-1967) Collection, Sweden, before 1953. Sotheby's London, Masterpieces of Chinese Precious Metalwork. Early Gold and Silver, 14 May 2008, lot 101.
Reliquaries of this type, made in the shape of a coffin or stone sarcophagus, were produced in various precious materials including gold, silver, crystal and jade during the Tang dynasty. The coffin-shaped reliquaries were made to hold sacred relics and were made in various sizes so that they could be fitted one within the other. Examples of this are the two small coffin-shaped caskets found in the Famen Temple, Shaanxi province in 1987. The larger of the two, 10.5 cm. long, is made of crystal, and the smaller, 6.5 cm. long, which fits inside, is made of jade. It was this latter reliquary that was said to hold Buddha's finger bone. These two reliquaries were contained within three other caskets of square shape: iron, gilt-silver and sandalwood, all of diminishing size, with the outer iron casket 22 x 22 cm. in size. All of the aforementioned, except for the sandalwood casket, are illustrated by Carol Michaelson in Gilded Dragons: Buried Treasures from China's Golden Ages, The British Museum, 1999, pp. 160-62, nos. 117-120. Two small parcel-gilt silver coffin-shaped reliquaries also found in the Famen Temple are illustrated by Zhang Tinghao, ed., Famen Temple, Shaanxi, 1990, pp. 83 and 87.The tradition of coffin-shaped reliquaries continued into the Song dynasty. A silver example, 11.5 cm. at its highest end, was recovered from the 'underground palace' of the Song-dynasty Jingzhi Temple pagoda at Dingzhou, Hebei province, which was built in AD 977. See the catalogue for the exhibition, Treasures from the Underground Palaces: Excavated Treasures from Northern Song Pagodas, Dingzhou, Hebei Province, China, Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, 1997, col. pl. 3, and no. 3, p. 123. As with the present reliquary, the sides are engraved, with the Green Dragon on one side and the White Tiger on the other.
