1-234-668 - The Museum of East Asian Art/Heritage Images

Gilt-bronze applique fragment, Eastern Han dynasty, China, 25 AD-220 AD. A gilt-bronze applique fragment of roughly rectangular shape but with a bulging middle section on the top. The fragment has a slightly raised edge all round. One side is decorated in the middle with the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wang Mu) seated on a throne with a figure riding a snake to one side and a feline and cloud in the sky above. Other figures and animals approaching the godess are rendered in low relief; to one side a dragon, a toad, a twin-headed apsara, a tadpole and two fairies in the sky all with incised details. The reverse is undecorated. Xi Wang Mu (Queen Mother of the West) is the Daoist goddess of immortality. She rules over the paradise of the immortals and lives in a jade palace in the Kunlun Mountains.