Ceremonial Banquet Vessels in Silver and Gold

Today, this silver jug stands in a wooden frame in a chapel of the Lhasa Jokhang, one of the oldest temples in Tibet. The tall ewer was hammered from silver sheets, cut and assembled in four parts, with two hemispherical sections joined at the diameter of the circle, and a long thin neck surmounted by an animal head with round mouth from which liquid can be poured. At the nape of the neck, a necklace is formed of small metal circles in repoussé, each with a square cut out at the center, their shapes adapted from Tang Chinese coins. The jug weighs seventy-seven pounds (thirty-five kilograms) when full of liquid, and monks fill it daily with offerings of chang, Tibetan barley beer. The jug’s upper bowl features raised designs in gilded heart-shaped medallions, and the lower bowl presents three scenes representing Central Asian people. These figures, two lively solo dancers (figs. 2 and 3) and three men in drunken revelry (fig. 4), reflect Tibetan familiarity with their neighbors’ appearance and customs. The animal head of the jug has variously been identified as a horse, a camel, a sheep, or a deer. The Kings’ Chronicle (Gyelpo Katang), written in about 1345, described ten silver chang jugs hidden in the Jokhang in ancient times, of which three had camel heads and seven had duck heads, while the Fifth Dalai Lama’s account of the Jokhang refers to the jug as “the great silver vessel with a horse head.”1 

Imperial Treasures as Symbols of Power

Reputed to be associated with the Tibetan emperors, particularly Songtsen Gampo (ca. 605– 649), the first Tibetan ruler of historical record, this ewer is conserved in the chapel that bears his name.2 This sovereign is traditionally revered for his foundation of the Jokhang Temple, although he is better known for his numerous military campaigns to unify Tibet and expand Tibetan territory, which proved crucial to the establishment of the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia. During the more than two centuries that the empire lasted, it carried on communications and trade with the outside world via the lucrative and multicultural Silk Roads threading between China and the Mediterranean world. These conquests are important to consider because they help explain the foreign connections and inspirations formative to Tibetan art and civilization during the imperial period, which this ewer reflects. Notably, the Sasanian Persian aesthetic had a profound impact on Tibetan art and culture. In Dunhuang, Turfan, and the Silk Road oases, Tibetans encountered the populations of Sogdian colonies—merchants, weavers, or artisans of silver and gold—who emulated Sasanian models of design for armor, metalwork, and textiles, leading Tibetans to import textiles and silver with animals, birds, and hybrid creatures in Iranian styles.3 The Tibetan aristocracy even adopted the customs and vessels of the Iranian wine banquet, such as wine bowls, rhytons with animal heads, decanters, cups, and animal-headed ewers,4 with the help of a partially gilt-silver rhyton, wine decanter, and cup (fig. 5) inscribed with Tibetan letters (fig. 6).5 

Tibetan trade and diplomatic missions were important corollaries of these conquests. According to the Chinese Tang Annals, Tibet made the spectacular gifts in 641 of a goose-shaped golden ewer seven feet high, capable of holding almost sixteen gallons (sixty liters) of wine, and in 648, a miniature golden city decorated with animals and men on horseback.6 The tribute continued, including in 658, a large bowl or basin of gold; in 727 hundreds of silver and gold vessels to be exhibited outside the imperial palace in Chang’an; in 728, a vase, a bowl, a duck, all in gold; in 824, a yak, a sheep, a bull, and a rhinoceros of silver.7 Were these creations of Tibetan goldsmiths or imports via the Silk Road?8 Comparison with Tibetan artifacts may help us to understand their provenance as well as inform an assessment of what Tibetan artisans then produced.

Techniques and Materials

By their techniques and materials, these artifacts, a banquet set with ewer, decanter, and plate (fig. 7), clearly show the workmanship of a single atelier. Aesthetically, they are characterized by a spacious composition emphasizing the brilliance of pure gold, embellished by large-scale decorative motifs of birds and/or fantastic creatures. Each creature has raised sections of gold into which the turquoise was inset, with the bodies outlined in beads of gold granulation.9 The prominence of the bird designs was linked to the ancient Sasanian and Sogdian political and religious concept of the bird as a symbol of royal power, particularly royal charisma, in Sogdian iconography;10 when later incorporated into Buddhism, the bird acquired connotations as a symbol of rebirth. The plate has four ducks framing a central medallion of a kirtimukha, an ancient Indian motif that found its way to the Sogdian world as well as Tibet and Nepal. Since the insignia of rank in Tibet attributed gold and turquoise exclusively to the sovereign and his immediate family, it is understood that these gold artifacts reflect the highly sophisticated taste of the Tibetan court. The ewer and plate both have brief Tibetan inscriptions as well as small punched circle marks indicative of the weight of gold.11 According to David Pritzker’s research, the vessels with their “sleek linear forms . . . point to a Sogdian master goldsmith.” Although no vessels like these have been found in the Sogdian world, he suggests that they “were fashioned by a Sogdian craftsman in western Central Asia and subsequently imported to Tibet in an undecorated state to be embellished locally, probably under direct imperial commission.” Indeed, several plain gold decanters of similar dimensions have been excavated from the royal Azha tombs in Qinghai, tending to support his analysis.12 

Aesthetics

Rather than animals or birds, the bowl of the Lhasa silver jug has three figural scenes in gilt repoussé, separated by thick scrolls with a heart in the center of the scrollwork. An inert hefty man with thick eyebrows, long beard, mustache, and curly hair is carried by two younger men, in a state of drunken revelry (fig. 8). Their hair, long curls, and beards might indicate Central Asian or Mediterranean ethnic groups. The man being carried wears a short cape over his robe, whose long sleeves hang far beyond the wrist. Such attire was already represented among Tibetan costumes in Dunhuang. The other two scenes, in gilt silver, show men wearing long-sleeved robes of thick fabric performing the dance known in China as the Sogdian whirl (figs. 2 and 3). Each dancer holds above his head a large lute recalling kinnara (fig. 9), celestial musicians, and musicians in the divine orchestra painted on Tibetan coffins, as well as in murals of Dunhuang and Yulin.13 According to the Tang Annals, a caravan set out from Samarkand in 718 for Xi’an, carrying carpets, brass, precious rings, mats, lions, and dancers—female performers of the Sogdian whirl.14 The dance was so fully assimilated to China that a dancer performs the Sogdian whirl in Amitabha’s paradise in Yulin Cave 25 (ca. 820). Painted coffins from Tibetan tombs consistently illustrate musicians and the dancer of the Sogdian whirl in their vision of the paradise for the deceased, revealing Tibetan adaptation of the foreign motifs.15

The aesthetic motifs of this ewer show complex cross-cultural relations. Perhaps the most telling evidence is a drawing by the German archaeologist Alfred Grünwedel copying a mural of about the ninth century he observed in the Uyghur palace in Gaochang (near present-day Turfan, China).16 He drew two grandiose ewers, with elongated necks, one with a bird-head finial and one with a celestial deer (fig. 10). These were the models that may have inspired the shape of the silver jug now in Lhasa, while the motifs have multiple origins. An alternative interpretation attributes the manufacture of the Lhasa silver jug to “Sogdian or other foreign silversmiths from Western Central Asia about in the 8th century.”17  Most probably it was made far from Lhasa, in the realms of the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia.