S925 Silver Taotie Beast Face Bell Pendant

A beast with only a head and no body. That is the taotie pattern on Shang and Zhou bronzes: a great mouth, two bulging eyes, symmetrical left and right. The old books call it gluttonous, eating until it burst; the Lüshi Chunqiu has a line about a creature with a head and no body, which devours a man and cannot swallow him, and destroys itself in the attempt. So the taotie carried a warning from the beginning, not decoration alone. The pattern usually sits on the belly of a ding or on the handles of a gui — the most conspicuous places on a ritual vessel.

Here the mask is set on a bell. The bell is hollow with a small pellet inside that sounds when it moves. The note is not sharp but dull, because the silver wall is not thin. The critical thing in a bell is even wall thickness: uneven, and the note goes dead; the thin side is also where it cracks. This one sounds steady when shaken, which says the wall was controlled. A small ring is soldered to the top, left open at the seam so a cord can be threaded; the seam faces backward and does not show from the front.

The two horns curl outward, the eyes bulge round, a vertical ridge runs down the bridge of the nose, the mouth stretches to both sides and a row of teeth fills it. The teeth are blunt, not pointed, so they do not prick when worn. The gaps between them are cut deep and hold no light, reading as a black line at a distance; the whole gradation of the jaw depends on it. A slit is left in the lower rim of the bell for the sound to come out. Too wide and the note scatters, too narrow and it is muffled; the width was found by testing.

Three versions: South Red agate, Sleeping Beauty turquoise, and a small Sleeping Beauty. The turquoise is a clear blue with little matrix, and against the silver mask it reads cold; the South Red is warm, and the red takes some of the ferocity out of the mask. The small version is reduced all round: the large one goes on a neck cord, the small one on a wrist strand.

Over time the pellet polishes a bright ring inside the bell and the note gradually clears — a change the piece makes on its own. Dust collects in the recesses, and enough of it muffles the sound; the ring at the top can be unscrewed for cleaning, but do not poke inside with a needle, because a pellet knocked off centre will jam. Both South Red and turquoise dislike knocks, and a swinging bell will strike other beads, so leave a little space when stringing. At the size of a fingernail the note is small and does not make noise on a wrist strand, which is why it sells better than the large one.