A RED LACQUERED-WOOD BOOK COVER CHINA, MING DYNASTY (1368-1644), YONGLE PERIOD (1403-1424), CIRCA 1410 |

with the central panel of the outer face decorated with scrolling lotus vine issuing from the mouth of an amrita vase tied with flowing scarves and supporting a flaming triratna, with lotus flowers either side bearing Auspicious Emblems including a flaming wheel of the law, a victory banner, two fishes and a treasure vase, all contained within a border of lotus petals and edged with running scrollwork, with inscriptions in Chinese and Tibetan within a cartouche on the inner face, and the ends decorated with classic scrolling vine and kirtimukha lion faces Himalayan Art Resources item no. 18454.

The book cover is decorated in the qiangjin technique developed in China in the Song period (960-1279) in which a design is finely incised into the lacquer and leaf or powdered gold is then rubbed into the pattern. The cover comes from a set of the 108 volumes of the Tibetan Kanjur commissioned by the Yongle emperor in 1410, and was the first xylographic edition of the Tibetan canon to be printed in Beijing, see Heather Karmay, Early Sino-Tibetan Art, Warminster, 1975, p. 55. It is recorded in the annals of the early Ming dynasty, Mingshi Lu, that Kundrepa, abbot of the Tibetan monastery of Sakya, visited the Yongle emperor’s court between 1413 and 1414 and was presented with Buddhist texts, zangjing, on two occasions, ibid., p. 55. It is likely that this exquisite example was part of the imperial bequest to the Sakya abbot.

It is said that the covers of other sets of texts bequeathed during the Yongle period were not as elaborately decorated, such as the volumes presented to Shakya Yeshe (1354-1435) who was in China from 1415 to 1416: for similar examples and further discourse on the history of imperial bequests of sets of the Kanjur during the Yongle period, see Kathryn H. Selig Brown, Protecting Wisdom: Tibetan Book Covers from the MacLean Collection, Munich, London, New York, 2012, p. 199. Compare also the red and gold lacquered qiangjin book covers in the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, see James C.Y. Watt and Denise Patry Leidy, Defining Yongle: Imperial Art in Early Fifteenth-Century China, New York, 2005, p. 56, pl. 22.