The incense burner of grey-colored earthenware is comprised of two parts. The receptacle is fashioned as a shallow rounded bowl with a wide mouth surrounded by a high flange for receiving the lid while it is supported on a sturdy foot with inverted cup-shaped base and short cylindrical stem. The low angled domed lid is surrounded by straight sides where it meets the receptacle and is surmounted by a knob formed as a small, inverted dish. The thick walls of the lid are carved through forming openwork triangular shapes interspersed with deeply sculpted triangles along with stippling or recessed dots on the surface and a single row of deeply carved triangles aligned sideways on its vertical wall mirroring the design of the receptacle.
Heavy potting and sturdy construction coupled with carved, incised, openwork and sometimes painted decoration are standard features characterizing a category of pottery incense burners produced during the Western Han dynasty. The published examples are usually but not exclusively round in shape, have something in common with the late Zhou bronze food vessels known as dou, from which the ceramics are thought to have evolved and they appear to be the more modest relatives of bronze incense burners (xianglu) with reticulated lids to allow for the dissemination of the perfumed smoke. Earthenware examples have been excavated across a wide area including Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces and include the important datable 2nd century BCE tomb no. 1 at Mawangdui in Hunan province, While pottery mingqi, “spirit objects” made expressly for burial, are often simply replicas of the world of the living to be taken into the afterlife, some of the implements anticipated the needs of the deceased or had actually been used prior to burial. For example, vessels might be loaded with grain and food offerings and one reported example, from tomb 1 at Mawangdui, quite similar to the present xianglu, contained “perfume and ash” indicating its use before or during the funerary ceremony (fig 1).
We normally consider the ceramic replicas of bronzes as low-cost substitutes for burial in less extravagant graves than those of kings, princes and nobles. However, the potters of the present category of incense burners appear to have made some creative leaps of their own and their wares were recognized, appreciated, and accepted into the circles furnishing such extravagant tombs as those at Mawangdui.1
1.See Kaikodo Journal XII (Autumn 1999), no. 46, for a discussion of a related earthenware xianglu with comparative materials and Susan Erickson,”Boshanlu-Mountain Censers of the Western Han Period: A Typological and Iconological Analysis,” Archives of Asian Art, XLV, 1992, pp. 6-28.
Fig. 1: Earthenware xianglu, Western Han, 2nd c. B.C., from tomb 1 at Mawangdui, Hunan province, after Zhongguo meishu quanji, taoci, Beijing, 1993, no. 295, p. 83.
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