A Rare White Jade Terrapin Neolithic Period, Dawenkou Culture
A Rare White Jade Terrapin Neolithic Period, Dawenkou Culture
A Rare White Jade Terrapin Neolithic Period, Dawenkou Culture
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A Rare White Jade Terrapin Neolithic Period, Dawenkou Culture

Circa 4100 – 2600 BCE
Length: 5.6 cm.

Provenance:

The Peony Collection, Hong Kong. Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, June 2020, Lot 381. Important North American Collector

Exhibited:

Jades from China, by Angus Forsyth and Brian McElney.
The Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, England, 1994, catalogue number 52.

Published:

Jades from China, by Angus Forsyth and Brian McElney.
The Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, England, 1994, catalogue number 52.

 

The terrapin has round eyes, a pointed nose, detailed toed flippers, a short curved tail, as well as a neck delineated by a double line, and is fashioned from a flattened pebble of translucent hetian white jade. The animal’s back is pierced with a circular aperture drilled on an angle.

Terrapins fashioned from Hetian white jade are very rare. The current pendant, worked from a translucent white stone as a turtle is accentuated with well defined outlines and subtle contours. Other white jade examples from the Neolithic period have been excavated in the Lake Baikal area of southern Siberia.

Compare a very similar example in the Avery Brundage Collection in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, illustrated in Rene-Yvon Lefebvre d’Argence. Chinese Jades in the Avery Brundage Collection, San Francisco, 1972, pl. XXII.

Another example from the Edward and Louis B. Sonnenschein Collection is published in Archaic Chinese Jades from the Edward and Louise B. Sonnenschein Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1953, pl. XXXIX, no. 8.

See also a Dawenkou culture grey jade ‘frog’ pendant, also from the Peony collection, sold in these rooms, 28th/ 29th November 2019, lot 739.