Stone official image

[Statue of stone official]

Statue of stone official, Sui Dynasty, 134 cm high and 52 cm wide
This stone statue is a pair of stone samurai statues in the Palace Museum, presumably the gatepost of the tomb. This is the portrait of a literary official, wearing Futou on his head, wearing a narrow sleeved lapel Hu suit, with lace at his waist, and his hands arched in front of his chest. There is a slender object in front of you. Its name and function are unknown. There are tiger animals carved under the feet
Wang Chong of the Eastern Han Dynasty wrote in The Lun Heng • Luan Long: “Therefore, today’s county officials cut peaches as human beings, set them on the side of the door, painted the shape of a tiger, and painted the door jamb… carved the effect image, hoping to prevent the evil.” The so-called door jamb is what we now call the door post. Its role is to protect the door. The front of the tomb is generally wide. Due to the requirements of stone and aesthetics, the door leaf cannot be too wide, which provides enough space for the door post. The subject matter of this type of doorpost image is mainly the doorman, the four gods, the eastern king, the western king’s mother, etc., with flowers and grass patterns as decoration. It contains the idea of strictly preventing the invasion of evil spirits and hoping that the tomb owner will rise to heaven and live forever. This method of expression in the Eastern Han Dynasty began to be simplified from the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang Dynasties. It only retained the subject matter of officials and evolved into a symmetrical form of civil and military affairs, one left and one right