SHOPPING FOR ANTIQUES : Chinese Ivories

CHINA HAS LONG fascinated the Western World. Local antique dealers report that the visual magnificence of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “The Last Emperor,” along with recent cultural exchanges with the People’s Republic of China, have triggered fresh interest in the antique arts and crafts of China--everything from silk ceremonial robes to the intricately carved, reclining nude female figures known as medicine ladies. These small ivory figures are thought to have been adapted from Christian representations of the Infant Jesus. They began to appear soon after the arrival of the first European traders, notably the Portuguese. The medicine ladies most sought after today were carved at Zhangzhou, north of Canton, during the Ming Dynasty (1580-1644).

Popular belief holds that these hand-size female figures (also often carved in amber, quartz and jade) were used by aristocratic women in order to show their doctors where some bodily pain existed, since a Chinese woman would not allow herself to be examined in the nude. Some scholars, however, maintain that the ivory figures were useless from a diagnostic point of view--they were too small--and furthermore are nowhere mentioned in the history of Chinese medicine. Instead, these scholars believe, the figurines were erotic toys carried around in the recesses of a voluminous sleeve or displayed in private cabinets.

These Chinese ivory ladies are not particularly erotic, however, and the popular belief that they are medicine ladies seems more plausible. Consequently, they have become high on the list of status-symbol gifts from doctors’ wives to their husbands.

Medicine ladies can be found at Warren Imports in Laguna Beach, the I.M. Chait Gallery in Santa Monica and the Gallery in Palos Verdes Estates.