A very rare 'huanghuali' bamboo-form table with integral foot rollers (Banzhuo), 17th / 18th century

Grace Wu Bruce, Hong Kong.

California Private Collection. 

Christie's New York, 16th September 1998, lot 55.

My Humble House, Taipei, 2004.

The present table is a fine and rare example of the beloved ‘bamboo style’ of Ming dynasty huanghuali furniture. Demonstrating extraordinary understanding and respect for the precious hardwood, Ming cabinetmakers smoothed and assembled slender poles of huanghuali and joined them to loop around sturdy legs like steam-bent bamboo ‘wrapping the leg’ (guotui). This understated yet splendid design embraces the literati reverence for bamboo as a symbol of moral integrity, resilience, and cultivated restraint – bending with the wind, yet never breaking. Unlike later Qing carpentry, in which the focus frequently turned to accentuating the skill of the carver or the opulence of the owner, the bamboo style typifies the Ming scholars’ taste for refinement and quiet luxury – celebrating inner virtue and outer form. 

This table is particularly notable – indeed apparently unique – in its incorporation of a lower board of foot rollers. Footrests with inbuilt rollers (gundeng) represent an important feature of literati life, frequently depicted in print books and paintings but very rarely surviving, let alone as part of a broader table construction. See, for example, the central figure of Wang Shimin (1592-1680) seated at a table of similar proportion with a long footrest, possibly of the roller-type, in Gu Jianlong’s (1606-1687) Portrait of Wang Shimin in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession no. 96.68.2) (Fig. 1). Inbuilt rollers are seen in foot stools, such as one illustrated in Wang Shixiang, Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, Hong Kong, 1990, pl. E52, alongside figs 2.47 and 2.48 illustrating related rollers in Ming contexts; another sold at Christie’s New York, 24th March 2011, lot 1370; and a third example with a broader footrest incorporating two rollers, sold from the Collection of Dr. S.Y. Yip in our Hong Kong rooms, 6th October 2015, lot 124. 

Compare also huanghuali tables of rounded bamboo style, without the addition of rollers, such as a closely related banzhuo in the Mueller bequest to the Honolulu Academy of Arts (accession no. HAA 5978.1), illustrated in Stephen Little and James Jensen, 'Chinese Furniture in the Honolulu Academy of Arts - The Fredric Mueller Bequest,' Orientations, January 1991, fig. 6; a larger baxian fangzhuo in Best of The Best: The MQJ Collection of Ming Furniture, Hong Kong, 2017, pp 94-97; and a banzhuo from the collection of Aso O. Tavitian, sold in these rooms, 8th February 2025, lot 1121.