Hook with perforations
To create this hook, the artisan used pale gray-green hetian jade with whitish mottling and gray veins, polished to a waxy shine. The piece is distinguished from most other hooks by its one short end curving almost parallel to the other, which is carved to depict a dragon's head. The short end has a tenon pierced horizontally with a hole. The dragon's head has a slit mouth with a small cavity and cloudlike whirls on the beard, eyebrows, and hair. Varied short bevel strokes and densely curved lines produce details. A red residue in the mouth and holes consists of remnants of applied cinnabar.
Yang Boda, research fellow at the Palace Museum, Beijing, in his survey of the jade collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1996, dated this piece to the Ming period. A few months later, Mou Yongkang, archaeologist of the Zhejiang Institute of Archaeology, during a short visit to the museum, concluded that the piece was an earlier work. Archaeologists have found no other hooks with quite the same pierced end and tenon, apparently designed for stringing or fastening something to the hook. Generally, men wore belt hooks, and only occasionally were hooks found in female tombs. The earliest excavated belt hooks, dating to the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 bce), were found in the Central Plains area and were made of metal. There is archaeological evidence that the single-hook form continued until the Han period, but evidence is lacking as yet of the use of a hook and buckle together in early periods.
Three possible functions have been suggested for this piece: (1) as a woman's pendant in a shape borrowed from a belt hook; (2) as an ornament modified from an old hook; and (3) as a specially designed belt hook with holes for hanging objects. Any of these would have been fairly common in jade craft.
The nicely proportioned dragon's head has a strongly archaic style. The cavities reveal a rather simple crafting process, and the horizontal slit on the mouth is not perfectly straight, signaling that it was made using a manual tool.
