Scabbard buckle (wei)

A gray hetian jade with flaws and dark-brown veins has been used to form a rectangular plate with two ends that hook downward. A kui dragonet creeps on the top, its upper body in openwork and its lower limbs clinging to the plate. The back of the plate is plain, with a rectangular slot off to one side.

Jade sword pommels and guards emerged in the early Eastern Zhou period, while buckles and chapes did not appear until around 400 bce. Sword buckles have been unearthed mainly in the Central Plains, Liaoning, Hunan, Yunnan, and Guangdong. After the Han period, the term wei was used for a sword buckle, also known as a slide. A buckle would be attached vertically to the upper part of a scabbard, with the buckle's slot facing the scabbard. The slot may have been intended as a fingerhold, although recently it has been suggested that a belt might have been inserted through the slot so that the sword could be carried on a person's waist. A relief or line work dragonet, which always had a long, curving tail that split into two coiled floral ends, ornamented the scabbard buckles of Western Han nobles (Museum of the Western Han Tomb of the King of Nanyue 1991, plate 72; Institute of Archaeology 1980a, vol. 2, plate 64, fig. 5).

Brownish pigments have been applied to this piece. The craftwork and the dragonet design led to a mistaken dating to the Han period. The dense parallel lines depicting the beard and hair, along with the elliptical eyes with cross-hatching, have no archaic flavor and are characteristics of much later dragonet forms.