skillfully and brightly woven in silk with finer details delicately pencilled in ink, depicting a young boy dressed in official robes holding a vase with three arrows beside a smaller boy carrying a ruyi sceptre, surrounded by further boys at play and engaged in various pursuits including dragon dance, flying lanterns, lighting firecrackers, paying tributes to the star gods, spinning top, playing chess, fighting cricket and bird, picnicking, playing hide and seek, and ball games, set in a fenced garden landscape with flowering trees and jagged rockwork with flying bats, below distant mountains and further trees emerging from vapourous clouds, all reserved against a rich orange-red ground
This vibrant panel is an impressive example of
kesi embroidery, a type of silk tapestry that entailed the intricate hand-weaving of decorative designs and brocades, sacred iconography or calligraphy often employed for the production of imperial textiles.
Kesi panels finely embroidered with the auspicious motif of playful children in various pursuits were used as bed hangings in matrimonial chambers. The
baizi (‘hundred boys’) motif refers to the sons of King Wen, the legendary father of the founder of the Zhou dynasty King Wu, who had ninety-nine sons and adopted one more to make one hundred. By the Ming dynasty, the motif came to represent the wish for many sons, and was reproduced on a variety of media, including porcelain and lacquer, and the theme continued to be employed through the Qing dynasty.
Kesi of this type and decoration were used as curtains of palace bedchambers, for example see some hanging in situ in the Kunninggong (Palace of Earthly Tranquility) in the Forbidden City, published in Qingdai gongting shenghuo [Life in the Palace during the Qing dynasty], Hong Kong, 1985, pl. 404.
For the Ming dynasty prototypes, see one woven in vivid polychrome silk and gold-wrapped thread, sold in our London rooms, 12th July 2006, lot 59, and again in these rooms, 7th April 2015, lot 3117; and two sold in our New York rooms, the first, from the Mary Porter Walsh collection, sold on 28th November 1994, lot 170, and the second, originally included in the exhibition Threads of Imagination: Central Asian and Chinese Silks from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, Spink & Son Ltd, London, 1999, cat. no. 21 and sold 17th September 2013, lot 215.
