A particularly fine and rare pair of large nodding-head figures, depicting a mandarin and his companion both dressed in colorful traditional garb.

‘Nodding Head Figures’ and Europe

This fabulous, striking pair of Chinese nodding head figures are a wonderful example. They remain in stunning condition and are of particularly rare large size. Chinese nodding-head figures are documented in England and continental Europe as early as the 1760s and 1770s where they were imported from Canton, China.

Nodding-head figures were imported into England, Europe and America from Canton in large numbers from the 1780s. The great interest in these figures in England is derived in large part from the personal tastes of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Prince’s interest in Chinese decoration was first expressed in his Chinese Drawing Room at Carlton House, but reached its high point with Brighton Pavilion. The final achievement – an ornate palace of fantastical proportions and exotic furnishings – was due to the combined efforts of the Prince himself and his principal designers, John and Frederick Crace, in the twenty-five years after 1802 when the project was begun. A number of Chinese figures of this type were prominently displayed in the corridor of the Pavilion.

The Dragon Motif

The figures don traditional Chinese court dress, the principal motif being the dragon, the personal emblem of the emperor. In court language the word ‘dragon’ was used to describe everything connected with his life and position. For example, the emperor’s face was reverently referred to as ‘the dragon’s countenance’, his seat of power as the ‘dragon throne’, and even everyday things like his writing implement became the ‘dragon's brush’. Before his accession, the emperor had been a ‘dragon hidden in the depths’ and after his death, he ‘became a dragon again’.

The Five Colours

The dragons depicted on the robes are found writhing amid clouds, which The Huangchao Liqi Tushi, an illustrated encyclopaedic album of Qing imperial regulations and codes, stipulates must, on an emperor’s robe and all those of his family members, be of five colours: blue, red, yellow, white and black. The five colours represent the wu xing or five activities: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Like the Platonic elements of classical western antiquity, the wu xing symbolized the qualities of these substances. For example, wood indicated growth and the vitality of flourishing vegetation.

All phenomenal existence could be explained in terms of the interaction between the wu xing. Each of the wu xing was associated with a season of the year and its influence was thought to emanate from a point on a compass. Wood was associated with spring and the east, fire with summer and the south, metal with autumn and the west, and water with winter and the north. Earth was the centre of gravity, the fifth point of the Chinese compass, and was associated with mid-summer. These traditional symbolic correspondences played an important role in imperial ritual for over 2,000 years.