Shallow Basin Supported by a Bird (Bian) (early 400s BCE): Art, History and Details

Shallow Basin Supported by a Bird (Bian) (early 400s BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The bird, in its graceful and dignified pose, firmly grasps a pair of intertwined serpents cast in the lower basin. This composition of the bird's triumph over the serpent has been given various interpretations. The Chinese ethnographers regard this as a totemic symbol—a suggestion of a specific clan's superiority over contending neighboring peoples. Other scholars interpret this as good creatures warding off evil influences or as an early manifestation of the concept of complementary pairing (yin-yang, heaven-earth) in Chinese cosmology. The original appearance of this vessel was brilliant and colorful due to the use of malachite and azurite in inlaid decoration, producing red, green, and blue against the bronze surface.

Object facts

• Title: Shallow Basin Supported by a Bird (Bian)
• Date: early 400s BCE
• Culture: China, Warring States period (475–221 BCE)
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: bronze inlaid with powdered malachite and azurite
• Dimensions: Overall: 23.3 cm (9 3/16 in.); Diameter of base: 18.3 cm (7 3/16 in.)
• Collection: China - Zhou Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1991.8

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wilson, J. Keith. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
• “Recent Acquisitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art II: Departments of Asian Art: Supplement.” The Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1059 (1991): 417–24.
• "Chinese Antiquities in The Cleveland Museum of Art," Arts of China 75 (Nov. 1991): 54.

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.