Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Fairy Feeding Lingzhi Fungus to a Dragon (100–1 BCE): Art, History and Details

Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Fairy Feeding Lingzhi Fungus to a Dragon (100–1 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Han dynasty tombs were often furnished with grave goods to provide the deceased with items for the afterlife. This panel with a dragon was part of a miniature pottery stove to be placed in a burial chamber. This scene of a dragon being fed fungus by a winged fairy is molded on the panel. The dragon is an auspicious creature and an animal of the cardinal directions that protects the east.

Object facts

• Title: Panel from Model Cooking Stove: Fairy Feeding Lingzhi Fungus to a Dragon
• Date: 100–1 BCE
• Culture: China, from a tomb in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: earthenware with impressed relief decoration
• Dimensions: 11.5 x 30.8 x 1.3 cm (4 1/2 x 12 1/8 x 1/2 in.)
• Collection: China - Han Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1925.134

Collection credit

Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Whiting, Frederic Allen. “The Bequests of Mary Warden Harkness: A Tribute and an Accounting.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 15, no. 2, 1928, pp. 43–50.
• Janse, Olov and C.T. Loo. Briques et objets céramiques funéraires de l'époque des Han. Paris: Les Éditions d'art et d'histoire, 1936.
• Cox, Warren E. The Book of Pottery and Porcelain. New York: L. Lee and Shepard Co.; distributed by Crown Publishers, 1944.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.