Feb., 1912. Jade. 183 



Yun, where he was brought up. In his youth, he had an intrigue with 

 a princess of the court there, and the fruit of this clandestine union was 

 a child who subsequently was to be a famous minister in the state of 

 Ch'u. The grandmother ordered the infant to be carried away and 

 deserted on a marsh, but a tigress came to suckle the child. One day 

 when the prince of Yun was out hunting, he discovered this circum- 

 stance, and when he returned home terror-stricken, his wife unveiled 

 to him the affair. Touched by this marvellous incident, they sent 

 messengers after the child and had it cared for. The people of Ch'u, 

 who spoke a language differing from Chinese, called suckling nou, and 

 a tiger they called yii-t'u; hence the boy was named Nou Yii-t'u 

 "Suckled by a Tigress." 1 He subsequently became minister of Ch'u. 

 The time to which this tradition is ascribed is the end of the eighth 

 century b. c, and it seems very likely that the bronze referred to 

 presents an allusion to this event and was cast, in commemoration of it, 

 soon afterwards while the story was still fresh in the minds and im- 

 agination of the contemporaries. The work exhibits the brilliant 

 technical faculty of bronze-casting of that period, and I should go still 

 further to say that it must have originated from the hands of an artist 

 of Ch'u who created it for the glorification of his country; fertile poetic 

 imagination distinguished the people of Ch'u from the Chinese, as 

 shown by their songs preserved in the Shi king and by the famous 

 elegies of K'ii Yuan. If we look upon this production as an artwork 

 of Ch'u, we readily appreciate the fact that this piece is unique and 

 was saved from the doubtful honor of being copied or imitated in later 

 times; the subject was not apt to appeal to the Chinese. In speaking 

 of it in this connection, it was my intention to point out the early 

 deification of the tiger; also in this case, he is a guardian-spirit watch- 

 ing over the life of a child as he drives away the enemies from a grave. 

 As a deus protector, his image appears also on Chinese bronzes at an 

 early date. I secured for our collection a bronze tui of the Chou 

 period surmounted by the full figure of a tiger; a beautiful bronze 

 ewer excavated near the city of Ho-nan fu in the summer 19 10, the 

 spout of which is formed by a finely modeled tiger-head with open 

 jaws spurting forth the water when poured out; and a colossal bronze 

 vessel made in the Court-atelier of the Sung emperors with a cover 

 woiked into an imposing tiger-head pointing to an ancient model of 



1 Compare Legge, Chinese Classics, Vol. V, p. 297, and Tschepe, Histoire du 

 royaume de Tch'ou, p. 34. The word nou seems to be related to Tibetan nu in 

 nu-ma "breast" and nu-ba "to suck;" myti-t'u, yii is a prefix, and t'u possibly points 

 to Tibetan s-tag (pronounced ta) "tiger." Nevertheless, this very expression, i. e. 

 the position of the words, shows that the language of Ch'u did not belong to the 

 Tibeto-Burman, but to the Shan group; for a Tibetan language could make only 

 yii-t'u nou, but never in the reverse order. 



