Lot 41. A rare archaic bronze ritual food vessel, ding, Shang dynasty, 12th century BC; 20.4 cm, 8 in. Estimate: 1,000,000 - 1,500,000 HKD. Lot sold 1,260,000 HKD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

the exterior cast and inlaid in black with friezes of cicadas and pendent blades, all supported on three splayed flat legs cast with dragons, the interior with an inscription possibly reading ya chou, Japanese wood box.

Note: Notable for the crisp and linear rendering of its design band, this piece represents an unusual group of ding. Bronze ritual vessels fashioned with three flat legs in the form of menacing dragons with open mouths derive their form from pottery prototypes made from the Neolithic period. Pottery vessels of this form continued to be produced through to the Erlitou and Erligang phases, when the first bronze versions also appeared.

 While ding of this type were popular through to the Western Zhou dynasty, the tall legs and shallow shape of the present example places it in the latter part of the Shang dynasty. The unusually linear rendering of the band of cicada, a generally subsidiary motif, further suggests a date in the last centuries of the dynasty, probably after the move of the capital to Yinxu, present-day Anyang in Henan province. A ding with straight columnar legs, decorated with a closely related cicada band, was unearthed at Anyang, and illustrated in Wu Zhenfeng, Shangzhou qingtongqi mingwen ji tuxiang jicheng [Compendium of inscriptions and images of bronzes from the Shang and Zhou dynasties], vol. 1, pl. 89, together with a ding in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Beijing University, pl. 88.

 Vessels of this form and decorated with a band of cicada above pendant lappets are very unusual and no other closely related example appears to have been published. Ding of this type are more commonly known with zoomorphic masks or dragons, such as a slightly larger ding also unearthed at Anyang, illustrated in Zhongguo qingtongqi quanji [Complete collection of Chinese archaic bronzes], vol. 2, Beijing, 1997, pl. 57; and another, reputedly from Anyang, now in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, accession no. F30549.

 Bronzes bearing the inscription ya zhou include a gui vessel illustrated in Jessica Rawson, Western Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, Washington D.C., 1990, fig. 38.1, p. 362. There is also a number of Shang bronze ritual vessels in the National Palace Museum with a ya chou inscription, but differently written. These include the fangding illustrated in Shang Ritual Bronzes in the National Palace Museum Collection, Taipei, 1998, pl. 97. It is believed that ya chou was a powerful clan in Shandong which flourished during the late Shang dynasty to the early Western Zhou period

Sotheby's. Monochrome II, 9 October 2020, Hong Kong