Lot 183. An extremely rare and magnificent blue-splashed sancai pottery money chest, Tang dynasty (618-907). Height 7 1/8  in., 18.1 cm; Width 9 1/8  in., 23.2 cm; Depth 7 in., 17.8 cm. Estimate 80,000 — 100,000 USD. Lot sold 329,000 USD. Photo: Sotheby's 2014.

the rectangular box raised on bracket feet with cream-glazed studs simulating the metal prototype, the sides reinforced with amber panels with crescent tops secured with further studs, and applied with blue-glazed lion-masks or palmettes, the top with a small hinge-lidded cover applied with a loop for the attachment of a lock, surrounded by four crisply rendered lion-mask appliqués.

Provenance: Christie's Los Angeles, 4th December 1998, lot 71.
Christie's New York, 21st September 2000, lot 267.

Note: Models of money chests, which would have been secured with a padlock, have been found in several Tang tombs, but are otherwise extremely rare.

The various extant chests differ in their applied ornaments and in glaze colors, and come in two different sizes. Whereas the use of cobalt-blue is generally found only on the smaller size, the present piece belongs to the larger type and is particularly richly adorned. 

Two other pieces of this large size are glazed in sancai colors only, without any cobalt-blue: one of them excavated at Jinjiagou, Luoyang, Henan province and now in the Henan Provincial Museum is illustrated in Henan Sheng Bowuguan, Beijing, 1985, col. pl. 156; the other is preserved in the Rietberg Museum, Zurich, and illustrated in Yuba Tadanori, Chûgoku no tôji, vol. 3, Tokyo, 1995, col. pl. 55. 

Compare four chests of smaller size but with prominent areas of cobalt-blue, two of them excavated at Wangjiafen village in the eastern suburbs of Xi'an in Shaanxi province: one of these was included in the exhibition Gilded Dragons, The British Museum, London, 1999, cat. no. 48; the other, or an exact same model to the preceding, now in the Chinese Museum of History Beijing is illustrated in Tang Ceramics Made in Henan: The Tri-Color and Blue and White, Beijing, 2005, no. 645, p. 439; the remaining two pieces are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the St. Louis Art Museum, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics: The World's Great Collections, vol. 10, Tokyo, 1980, fig. 72; and in Mizuno Seiichi, Tôji taikei, vol. 35, Tokyo, 1977, p. 112, fig. 39.

Sancai glazed pottery cabinet, Tang Dynasty, in the National Museum of China, Beijing. 

Sotheby's. Fine Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art, New York, 18 march 2014