Lot 9808. The Yangling Hufu, an exceedingly important and rare gold-inlaid bronze tiger tally, Qin dynasty; 9.8 cm. Lot Sold 10,240,000 HKD (Estimate 8,000,000 - 16,000,000 HKD)
 

Provenance: Collection of Professor D.M.S. Watson (1886–1973), sold in 1965 at the sale below.
Sotheby's London, 19th October 1965, lot 29 (unillustrated).
Collection of Dr Wou Kiuan (1910–1997).
Wou Lien-Pai Museum, 1968–2022, coll. no. H.2.13, sold at the sale below.
Sotheby's New York, 22nd March 2022, lot 47.

Literature: Rose Kerr et al., Chinese Antiquities from the Wou Kiuan Collection. Wou Lien-Pai Museum, Hong Kong, 2011, pl. 32.

Note: When an enlightened ruler employs his ministers: ministers must not overreach to claim merit, nor present words that do not match reality.
Han Fei (ca. 280 – 233 BC)

These words, composed by Prince Fei in the blazes of the Warring States period, stand at the very core of the Legalist philosophy. Neither virtue nor opportunism stands at the foundation of a prosperous state; neither exaggeration nor flattery; rather, at the beating heart of the empire stands one person – the emperor – and his command is final.

This philosophy of strong governance and absolute authority formed and forms the basis of Chinese governance as we know it today, grounded in the rule of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang (d. 210 BCE). Rising from the rubble of the Warring States, Qin Shihuang, born Ying Zheng, raised a ferocious army, conquered rival states and united China for the first time under his banner and assuming the title of huangdi 皇帝— emperor.

It was in this context of royal command under the emperor’s watch that the present tally emerged. Cast from bronze in the form of a rampant tiger, inlaid with gold in a delicate seal script, the present tally represents one of the most iconic and important manifestations of Qin imperial power: the power of the emperor distilled in solid metal.

Two-sided tallies like the present enabled authority to flow between the emperor and his officials. With the same inscription on each corresponding half – one preserved by the emperor and the other by the commander or general – the command of a tiger tally could only be effected when the two sides were combined. While the first known literary reference to tiger-shaped tallies in the Records of the Grand Historian appears to be an example of their misuse by Lord Xinling to relieve the State of Zhao, their design theoretically served as a guarantee of direct imperial control. Only when the two sides of the tally were combined with their corresponding flanges and their inscriptions seen to match, could authority flow from the omnipotent emperor to his loyal subject. Indeed, the very word for ‘correspond’ in modern Chinese fuhe 符合 comes from this uniting (he 合) of tallies (fu 符).

​Today, surviving relics of China’s first emperors are shrouded in mystery and exceedingly rare. To date, only a handful of other tallies from this early period survive and only three convincingly attributed to the Qin dynasty: the Du Tiger Tally 杜虎符, uncovered by Dai Yingxin in 1973 from Shanmenkou Commune in the suburbs of Xi’an, now preserved in the Shaanxi History Museum. The Dongjun Tiger Tally 東郡虎符, acquired in Shaanxi in 1953 by the Zhouzhi County Cultural Relic Institution, of almost identical casting and form to the present, included in Yu tian jiuchang / Everlasting Like the Heavens, Shanghai, 2019, pp 260-261; and the Yangling Tiger Tally 陽陵虎符, formerly in the collection Luo Zhenyu (1866-1940) and now rightly preserved in the National Museum of China, Beijing, illustrated in Zhonghua wenming [Chinese civilisation], Beijing, 2010, pl. 267. The Yangling Tally, which shares the same twelve-character inscription as the present, provides an invaluable source of academic grounding to the present lot and has been the subject of countless studies. As scholars have pointed out, the Yangling inscription, in invoking the name of the emperor (huangdi) himself, can be dated reliably between the enthronement of Qin Shihuang in 221 BCE and the abdication of his crown prince Ying Ziying around 207 BCE. Also compare the Xinqi Tiger Tally, privately held in Paris, which was traditionally attributed to the Qin but has more recently been reattributed by Han Ziqiang to the Western Han dynasty by virtue of its inscription.
 

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