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Lot Essay
This pair of long tables appears to be part of a group of imperial zitan tables elaborately carved with kui dragon at the spandrels, and the tables stand out as the longest among other comparable examples published. Two smaller examples from the Palace Museum are illustrated by Hu Desheng in Ming Qing gong ting jia ju da guan, vol. I, Beijing, 2006, pp. 209 and 211, nos. 229 and 231. See another zitan long table which shares the same designs of cloud scrolls and lotus lappets found on the current tables, op. cit., p. 207, no. 225.
It is very rare to find massive furniture made of zitan wood and as such the production cost would have been considerable. Zitan wood became a very expensive commodity by the early Qing period since the trees dwindled dramatically from excessive lumbering activities throughout the Ming dynasty. The scarcity was compounded by the fact that these trees are slow growing and required centuries to fully mature into usable material. Although local sources of zitan exist in the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangdong and Guangxi, much of the material was imported from Southeast Asia. As an imported material, at the imperial workshops zitan wood was scrupulously monitored and carefully restricted.
This type of long table was usually placed against a wall in a palace room to display decorative objects as depicted on court paintings. An example still in situ inside the Cuiyunguan, the Hall of Green Cloud, is illustrated in Furniture of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (II), The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Hong Kong, 2002, pl. 263.
It is very rare to find massive furniture made of zitan wood and as such the production cost would have been considerable. Zitan wood became a very expensive commodity by the early Qing period since the trees dwindled dramatically from excessive lumbering activities throughout the Ming dynasty. The scarcity was compounded by the fact that these trees are slow growing and required centuries to fully mature into usable material. Although local sources of zitan exist in the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangdong and Guangxi, much of the material was imported from Southeast Asia. As an imported material, at the imperial workshops zitan wood was scrupulously monitored and carefully restricted.
This type of long table was usually placed against a wall in a palace room to display decorative objects as depicted on court paintings. An example still in situ inside the Cuiyunguan, the Hall of Green Cloud, is illustrated in Furniture of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (II), The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Hong Kong, 2002, pl. 263.