17TH-18TH CENTURY

This portable box was designed to fit between the rails of an official's sedan chair, to be easily removed and taken inside. This standard form accommodated paper and scrolls in the central section, with brushes and seals in the projecting ends.

A huanghuali sedan chair box of comparable size, formerly from the Ruth and Bruce Dayton Collection and now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is illustrated in R. Jacobsen and N. Grindley, Classical Chinese Furniture, Chicago, 1999, pp. 200-1. no. 74. A huanghuali sedan chair box with baitong corner mounts was sold at Christie’s New York, 13 September 2019, lot 884.