Owl-shaped zun, one of a pair

In their own fashion, these two owl-shaped vessels represent the height of early twentieth-century work in jade. The sheer size of the raw jadeite required to create such a pair is quite remarkable and could be found only after increased supplies from Burma became available in 1881. These pieces are quite close replicas of Shang dynasty zun, a shape that had only rarely been used as a model for earlier archaistic jades. Almost every detail of the decoration—the taotie masks on the chests, the coiled snakes that double as wings, the kui dragons that curl around the body, the bird-feather and leiwen grounds—are directly copied from Shang and early Zhou models. This suggests that the artisan who created these pieces had direct access to Shang bronzes.

Shanghai was a center for the collecting of early bronzes and large-scale pieces in jadeite. Although it is impossible to be certain, these pieces were likely created in a Shanghai workshop for a Shanghai patron.