page_title: Yixian glazed pottery luohans
section_title: Dating
hierarchical_section_title: Yixian glazed pottery luohans / Dating
caption_attribution_description: side image of the Chinese Luohan, Yixian, Hebei Province, China
context_page_description: A set of life-size glazed pottery sculptures of luohans usually assigned to the period of the Liao dynasty was discovered in caves at I Chou in Yi xian or Yi County, Hebei, south of Beijing, before World War I. They have been described as "one of the most important groups of ceramic sculpture in the world." They reached the international art market, and were bought for Western collections. At least eight statues were originally found, including one large fragment which was long thought to have been destroyed in Berlin during World War II, but has been sighted in Russia recently.
  Others are now in the following collections: the British Museum in London, two in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Penn Museum, Philadelphia, Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, the Musée Guimet in Paris, and a Japanese collection. With the example lost in Berlin, this makes a total of ten figures. There are fragments probably from the same set in other collections.
context_section_description: In their first years in the West the figures were usually assigned to the Tang Dynasty (618–907), with some proposing various later dates in the Ming dynasty period and those of the dynasties in between.  But a date in the regional Liao Dynasty (916–1125 CE) came to be preferred, although in recent years they are increasingly, partly because of the results of scientific dating methods, placed in the early 12th century, which is mostly in the following Jin dynasty (1115–1234) period.
  Thermoluminescence dating tests of the statues in Philadelphia and New York (younger figure) produced a midpoint date of 1210, ± 100 and 200 years respectively, the midpoint being during the period of the following Jin dynasty.  Derek Gillman tentatively suggests the specific date of 1159, to match the recorded renovation of a large temple in the region, which he proposes as a candidate for their original location.  An early 12th-century coin was also found inside the Boston figure.
  A significantly different dating is proposed by Hsu, based mainly on inscriptions on stone stelae which she connects to the figures.  The earliest of these records the completion in 1519 of a number of figures commissioned by a Song Jun; these had taken eight years to make. Another stele dated 1667 records the repair of Buddhist figures; Hsu argues this is when at least some of the replacement heads were added.
caption: The older of the New York figures, from the side
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