EARLY QING DYNASTY, 17TH CENTURY

The two characters, Zhong Qian, is identified as the Pu Cheng who was a native of Jinling, Jiangsu province. Pu Cheng was the founder of the Jinling school of bamboo carving. Born in 1582, he was active until the early Qing dynasty, and was famed for his carvings of fan frames, parfumiers, and various types of figures. A signed carved wrist-rest from the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection was included in the exhibition, Chinese Bamboo Carving, Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1978, and illustrated in the Catalogue, Part I, p. 80, col. pl. 10, and pp. 170-171 (two views).

The poetic inscription by the Tang poet Li Bai (701-762) highly complements the carved scene. The 'Shu Roads' is a general term to a series of historical roads, part of which were formed by wooden planks, that were built through the mountainous East-West barrier formed by the Qinling, Micang and Daba mountain ranges. These roads connected the Wei river valley with its cluster of ancient capitals such as Chang'an, in the north, and the Sichuan plain with its old capital at Shu (present day Chengdu) in the south. These roads pass through some of China's roughest and most inhospital terrain. Li Bai composed his poem during one of his many journeys on his exile to Shu in which he referred, 'The Road to Shu is hard, harder than climbing to the sky'.