49

Northern China, probably Ningxia
Small Rug, 19th century

The field of this small rug seems to represent the pelt of a tiger, with stripes flanking a central spine. Live tigers or tiger skins are depicted in more or less recognizable form on rugs from Tibet and East Turkestan as well as China.

Tiger-striped saddle blankets made from real pelts are shown in Song Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.) paintings of mounted Mongolian nomads.¹ Paintings of the same era also depict quintessentially Chinese hermits and scholars sitting on whole tiger skins.²  It is not clear whether nomadic or sedentary weavers first translated this potent design to pile, but during the 18th and 19th centuries numerous such rugs, both in "saddle" and rectangular shapes, were made in or around the northern Chinese city of Ningxia.³

Coarse knotting, a loose handle, and a limited color scheme are typical features of older Chinese pile weaving and readily distinguish this rug from others produced farther west.

J.B.

1. See, for instance, the 12th-century fragmentary handscroll, Wen Ji's Captivity in Mongolia and her Return to China in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an intact 14th-century copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both reproduced in Robert A. Rorex and Wen Fong, Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.

2. One example is a painting, Autumnal Sounds by Moonlight, signed by the southern Song artist Ma Hezhi (d. 1190) and now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang. This is reproduced in Zhongguo meishu quanti (The Great Treasury of Chinese Art), Beijing, Cultural Arts Press, 1988, 4, pt. 2, p. 19 and pl. 32 (in Chinese).

3. A saddle blanket with a corresponding pattern and border was in the McMullan collection and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See McMullan, pl. 140. A closely related rectangular rug is pictured by Murray L. Eiland in Chinese and Exotic Rugs, Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1979, pl. 16.