A carved 'Yaozhou' celadon-glazed 'rhinoceros' bowl, Northern Song dynasty

Sotheby's Arcade, lot 239 (according to label).

Rooted in ancient legend, the motif of a rhinoceros gazing upward at the moon draws on the belief that a rhinoceros' horn was formed through the animal's communion with the moon's light. In early imagination, the rhinoceros was a creature of myth, endowed with a crescent-shaped horn that served as a conduit between earth and sky, allowing it to speak silently with the heavens.

A Yaozhou bowl in the Palace Museum, Beijing, carved with a similar scene of a rhinoceros gazing at the moon, is illustrated in Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Wenwu Zhenpin Quanji, Liang Song Ciqi, I / The Complete Collection of the Treasures of the Palace Museum: Porcelain of the Song Dynasty, I, Hong Kong, 1996, vol. 32, p. 147. For a closely related example sold at auction, see one previously in the J.M. Hu Collection, and sold at Christie's New York, 25th March 2022, lot 1027.