Checked content

File:ChangXingongdeng.jpg

Description
中文: 汉代的 長信宮燈

(Original text below:
汉代青铜鎏金灯具之一, 前172年铸造。中华人民共和国国家一级文物。现藏于中华人民共和国石家庄市河北省历史博物馆“满城汉墓”展区。

维基人 User:Refrain摄于河北省历史博物馆(2006年2月2日)。)

English: Gilt Bronze Human-Shaped Lamp, made in the Western Han Dynasty, dated 172 BC. It is a Grade I antique in China, and is now stored in the Hebei Museum.

Historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey, on page 66 of her Cambridge Illustrated History of China (1999), has this to say of the Han antique lamp:

Gilt bronze figure of a maidservant holding an oil-lamp, almost 19 inches tall, excavated from the tomb of Dou Wan, wife of one of Emperor Wu's brothers [i.e. Prince Liu Sheng], at Mancheng in Hebei province. This elegant gilded bronze lamp was cleverly designed to allow adjustments in the directness and brightness of the light and to trap smoke in the body. It was one of the nearly 3,000 objects of bronze, iron, gold, silver, jade, pottery, lacquer, and silk from this huge tomb that testify to the luxury and refinement of palace life.

On page 100 of his book Han Civilization (1982), archaeologist and historian Wang Zhongshu states this about the lamp found in Dou Wan's tomb:

The best-known item among them in the Mancheng find was the Changxin Palace lamp, gilded with bright gold, in the form of a kneeling palace maid holding the lamp in her hands. Not only was the palace maid beautifully sculptured, the lamp and its cover were cleverly designed so that both the lamp's illuminating power and the direction of its rays were (and still are) adjustable. Since the smoke was absorbed into the body of the maid through her arms, it was in fact an antipollution design.

Date Commons upload by Shizhao 12:54, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Source Originally from zh.wikipedia; description page is (was) here
Author User Refrain on zh.wikipedia
Permission
( Reusing this file)

cc-by

Licensing

w:en:Creative Commons
attribution
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license.
You are free:
  • to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
  • attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

The following pages on Schools Wikipedia link to this image (list may be incomplete):

Metadata

The best way to learn

Wikipedia for Schools was collected by SOS Children's Villages. More than 2 million people benefit from the global charity work of SOS Children, and our work in 133 countries around the world is vital to ensuring a better future for vulnerable children. There are many ways to help with SOS Children.