Gompertz, 156; The British Museum says of the pair illustrated below: "These funerary urns are decorated with two ‘animals of the four directions’, called 'siling 四靈' in Chinese. The White Tiger of the West is pursuing a dog and the Green Dragon of the East is chasing a flaming pearl. The birds on the covers may allude to the Red Bird of the South; but the symbol of the north, a tortoise with a snake, is not present. In China, artists decorated coffins and tombs with these creatures from the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) onwards. These jars stored provisions for the afterlife such as grain and are part of local southern burial practice."
Vainker, 110-111, though see Valenstein, 99, and Clunas, 97, 100, 229, where court patronage is said to have ended with the reign of the Xuande Emperor (d. 1435); Krahl and Harrison-Hall, 44 say (of the Southern Song) "The Longquan kilns were non-official kilns whose workers nevertheless made ceramics for the imperial household ...", repeated by the British Museum
