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Carved jade terrapin
From Allahabad, India
17th century AD
Carved from a single piece of green jade
This large jade terrapin is carved from a
single piece of green jade nephrite, and is a unique piece of
sculpture. It was found at the bottom of a water cistern during
engineering excavations in 1803 at Allahabad in Northern India, and
brought to England by Lieutenant General Alexander Kyd of the
Bengal Engineers.
Alexander Kyd was a relative of the Lt.
General Robert Kyd who founded the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta.
It was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1830 by Thomas Wilkinson
through James Nairne, a relative of the Kyd family.
The third Mughal emperor Akbar (reigned
1556-1605), built a new palace at the Hindu city of Prayag, which
he then renamed Allahabad. In 1583 he appointed the city as his
capital, though he never lived there. Instead, the city became the
residence of the crown prince Selim, his son by a Hindu princess
from the Kachwaha clan of the Rajputs, whom Akbar had married in
1562. Selim, later to become the emperor Jahangir (reigned
1605-27), was ambitious and impatient to inherit the throne, so he
established a royal residence at Allahabad in rebellion against his
father. The terrapin may date from this period, as a rare ornament
for the garden pools at the prince's palace. Selim is known to have
patronized jade carvers, and his fascination with natural phenomena
is recorded. The carving, which may have taken more than a year, is
extremely life-like, with the underbelly as carefully depicted as
the rest. The head is slightly off-centre so that the reptile
appears to be moving slowly forwards.
In 2006,
while it was on a tour of six other museums
around the United Kingdom, a naturalist identified the
terrapin as a female of the species Kachuga dhongoka
(common name; three-striped roof turtle or Indian dhongoka
terrapin), native to the river Yamuna which meets the Ganges at
Allahabad. When it first arrived in the British Museum, the
terrapin was prized as an exceptionally large piece of jade from
Central Asia, as well as for the high degree of realism captured by
the carver’s skill, and it was exhibited in the Mineral Gallery. A
stereoscopic photograph by Roger Fenton made in 1858 shows it
displayed on top of a table. When the natural history collections
moved to South Kensington in1880-83, the terrapin remained with the
man-made artefacts at the British Museum.
Margaret Sax, Janet Ambers, Nigel Meeks and
Sheila Canby, ‘The emperor’s terrapin’ in The British Museum
Technical Research Bulletin, pp35-41, Volume 1 2007.
S. Cary Welch, India: art and culture, 1300-1 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985)