EARLY QING DYNASTY

This delicate carving is stylistically very similar to a small carving of Hanshan and Shide together on a petal-raft, one of them similarly holding a fan palm, bearing the signature 'San Song', which refers to the famed late Ming bamboo carver Zhu Zhizheng. This carving is now in the Beijing Palace Museum Collection, illustrated in Zhongguo meishu quanji - 11 - bamboo, wood and ivory, Beijing, 1987, pl. 6 (fig .1).