papercut (art)

Cream papercut depicting two mandarin ducks in a lotus pond within a lotus panel; done by knife-cutting technique, pasted on black paper. Mandarin duck (yin yan) in pairs are traditional associated with marital devotion and affection in China. If they appear in a lotus pond they symbolise marital harmony and the bearing of many sons, as the lotus has many seeds.

Collection Information

These objects are only a part of our collections, of which there are more than 350,000 objects. This information comes from our collections database. Some of this is incomplete and there may be errors. This part of the website is also still under construction, so there may be some fields repeated or incorrectly formatted information.

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