Lot 14. Importante Lame Cérémonielle en jade, yazhang, Période Néolithique - Début de la dynastie Shang, ca. 2000-1500 avant J.-C.:Long. 35 cm; 13 3/4  in. Estimation: 80,000 — 120,000 €. Lot vendu 339,000 EUR. Photo Sotheby's 2015.

la longue hampe rectangulaire allant en s'évasant et se terminant en une extrémité fortement cintrée, la partie supérieure flanquée d'une série de crans de part et d'autre, rythmée de lignes horizontales gravées à la roue et percée au centre, la pierre d'un vert sombre ponctuée de zones noires, les deux faces lisses soigneusement polies, D.W. 3040. 

Provenance: C.T. Loo, Paris.

Littérature: Paul Pelliot, Jades Archaïques de la Chine appartenant à M.C. T. Loo, Paris, 1925, pl. VIII.2.

Paul Pelliot, Jades Archaïques de la Chine appartenant à M.C. T. Loo, Paris, 1925, Image © G. Van Oest, Editeur, Paris, 1925.

Paul Pelliot, Jades Archaïques de la Chine appartenant à M.C. T. Loo, Paris, 1925, pl. VIII.2, Image © G. Van Oest, Editeur, Paris, 1925

Notes: As noted by Jessica Rawson, large jade blades such as the present example from the David-Weill Collection have no prototypes among the stone implements of the Neolithic period and the source of this shape remains unknown, see Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, London, 1995, p. 188. Blades of this form are often of large size and are extremely finely and thinly carved suggesting a ceremonial function. They have also been described as sceptres.

While this blade type flourished in metropolitan China during the Erlitou period, the distribution of this blade type is surprisingly wide yet focusing on two principal sources, Shenmu Shimao in Shaanxi and Guanghan in Sichuan province, see Yang Boda, 'Jade Zhang in the Collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing', in Chinese Jade. Selected Articles from Orientations 1983-1996, pp. 141-146, and Jessica Rawson, ibid., pp. 188-191. 

While the basic form of these blades made at the same time in metropolitan China, the northwestern Shimao culture and the Erlitou culture at Guanghan is the same, there are variations in the details and choice of jade. The blade from the David-Weill Collection is carved from a dark green, almost black stone of little or almost no translucency. It may be linked to blades carved from a very similar quality and colour stone recovered from the hoard at Shenmu Shimao in Shaanxi. Several examples that entered the collections of the Palace Museum, Beijing, are discussed and illustrated in Yang Boda, ibid., pp. 145-147, figs. 8-11.

The Shimao jade blades were discovered before 1925, the blade from the David-Weill Collection was first published in 1925 by Paul Pelliot before it was acquired by David-Weill in 1930. It is possible that it originally came from the Shimao site in Shaanxi province and was among the numerous blades from this site that in the late 1920s and 1930s found their way into Western collections. Two other examples from the Eumorfopoulos Collection and acquired by the British Museum, London, in 1937, are illustrated in Jessica Rawson, ibid., p. 189, fig, 3. Similar blades from the Sonnenschein and Winthrop Collections are illustrated in Alfred Salmony, Archaic Jades from the Edward and Louise Sonnenschein Collection, Chicago 1952, pl. XXVIII, p. 88, no. 1; Max Loehr and Louisa G. Fitzgerald Huber, Ancient Chinese Jades from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975, cat. nos. 219, 220 and 221. 

Sotheby's. Trésors de la Chine ancienne de la collection David David-Weill, Paris, 16 Dec 2015, 10:30 AM