Winged cup with cloud design and inscription

Home Mawangdui Artifacts Winged cup with cloud design and inscription

Medium：Lacquer

Date：Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE)

Dimensions:Length: 16.9cm; height: 4.4cm

Origin: Unearthed from Han Tomb No.1 at Mawangdui, Changsha City, Hunan Province in 1972.

More than 100 pieces of lacquer winged cups were unearthed from Tomb 1 and Tomb 3. Beautifully made and varied in size, these drinking vessels with wooden bodies shaped by hewing are similar in shape, each with an oval body, round lips, a shallow flat bottom and two slightly upturned crescent flanges. The inner side of each cup is coated with vermilion lacquer and cloud designs, while the interior of the bottom bears the inscription “Junxingjiu” or “Junxingshi”, meaning “please enjoy drinking” or “please enjoy eating”. The outer side and the bottom of the cup are coated with black lacquer but there have no designs.

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“Oranges Grow in the Southern State”—Imaginations and Thoughts Triggered by the Cloud Pattern on Mawangdui Lacquer Objects
The lacquer objects and paintings on silk unearthed from Mawangdui have rich cloud, phoenix and bird patterns. These refi ned images with strong local characteristics and almost modernistic abstraction have rich cultural contents. They to a certain extent continue the images of the dragon boat, phoenix chariot and cloud carrier that flow freely on Chu paintings on silk, but they have neither been widely inherited by later generations nor entered modern designs. This paper begins with a focus on the cloud pattern of Mawangdui lacquer objects in an attempt to understand the vague space of the C

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