The object now known as the Cow-and-Tiger Bronze Table is not simply a small sculpture placed on a stand. Its four legs are the legs of a large standing ox; the animal’s back forms a shallow, dish-shaped surface. At the rear, a tiger climbs onto the ox and bites its tail. Beneath the larger animal, a smaller ox stands across a bar joining the legs. The form joins support, surface and narrative in one assembled object.
From the journal
Animals in Bronze: Power Cast into Dian Objects
A cow, a tiger and a smaller calf turn a bronze table into an encounter between object and image. The find belongs to a tomb at Lijiashan, while the surviving piece is displayed in Kunming.
In the same city · Kunming ↗A table built from an encounter
From a tomb to a museum
The bronze was found at Lijiashan, in tomb 24, near present-day Jiangchuan in Yuxi. A 2026 account of the excavation recounts how fragments were carefully marked and carried down from the hill before archaeologists fitted them together. After about a month of restoration, the team named the form for its two oxen and one tiger. The story of discovery is therefore part of the object’s meaning: what looks complete in a display case arrived through fragments, records and technical work.
Its present location is the provincial museum in Kunming; its archaeological context is the cemetery at Lijiashan. Keeping those places distinct matters. The museum makes the object available to a broad public, while the grave and its associated finds supply evidence about the community that placed it there. One city is not a substitute for the other.
Animal bodies become a working surface
The tiger-and-ox motif appears on other Dian bronzes, but a repeated animal image does not make every object perform the same task. Here the animals are integrated with a usable table form. Elsewhere, animals can decorate a lid, handle or fitting. Comparing objects helps readers see how artists adapted related forms to different structures.
Lijiashan has yielded many kinds of objects, including bronze vessels, tools and ornaments. These finds help archaeologists study production, burial and social life, but a tomb is a selected deposit rather than a complete inventory of ordinary experience. The bronze offers a vivid view of one designed object and the choices made around it. It does not tell us, without other evidence, exactly what every person in the ancient Dian world believed about tigers, cattle or power.