Carved Olive Stone Boat
Chen Zuzhang (active mid eighteenth century) · 1737, Qing dynasty
A magnifying glass is fixed in front of this case, and you need it. The object is an olive stone, the pit of the fruit, just over three centimetres long, carved into a small pleasure boat. It has a roof, windows with shutters that open and close, and eight figures on board: the poet Su Shi and his friends, a boatman, a servant preparing tea. On the underside, in characters too small to read without the lens, the carver has inscribed the full text of Su Shi's second Ode to the Red Cliff, more than three hundred characters, along with his own name and the date.
The carver was Chen Zuzhang, a craftsman from Guangzhou who worked in the imperial workshops in Beijing in the seventeen thirties. He was following a tradition of miniature carving in fruit stones, bamboo and walnut shells that Chinese scholars had prized since the Ming dynasty, when a famous essay described a similar boat with the same subject. Look through the glass at the figures, each with its own face and posture, at the tiny anchor chain and the mat sail, and at the shutters, which really move. The whole thing was cut with needles and fine knives, and the inscription must have been carved with the aid of a lens and extraordinary patience.
The boat shows the poet on the night of his famous river journey in ten eighty two, the same year and place as the Cold Food poems elsewhere in this museum. It was made for the Qianlong Emperor, who loved such curios, and it sits today among the ivory balls and bamboo carvings on the third floor. It is one of the smallest objects in the collection and one of the most astonishing, and children often enjoy it more than anything else in the building.
Did You Know? The shutters on the boat's windows are hinged and can actually be opened, on an object that would fit on a coin.
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