18th/19th century The seated, bearded and rather emaciated immortal with his left knee raised and tying the straps of his only sandal around his lower calf and left foot, whilst his sandal-less lame right leg rests lifeless on the ground, a small lion creeps around his right side and glares up at him with open mouth, the undaunted immortal smiles happily from an expressive face with full cheeks and bushy eyebrows, a large gourd is suspended from his back and tied with a twisting rope at his right shoulder. 4 1/4in (10.8cm) highFootnotes十八/十九世紀 牛角雕李鐵拐 This figure is unusual, in not depicting the immortal with his usual attribute of an iron-crutch on which he usually supports himself. Instead, rather cleverly, the artist simply suggests the lameness of the sitter by a far more subtle reference of depicting one sandle, and drawing understated attention to it by the act of tying it to his healthy foot. The story of Li Tieguai is fairly well-known but is well condensed by Stephen Little, Taoism and the Arts of China, p.331, No 125. He notes that the Ming Dynasty compendium the Complete Biographies of the Assorted Immortals (Liexian quanzhuan; 1598) compiled by Wang Shizhen, contains the following account of Li Tieguai: Li Tieguai had an eminent disposition. He attained the Tao at an early age. While cultivating realization in a mountain cave, Li Laojun [the deified Laozi] and Master Wenqiu [an adept of the Shang dynasty] often descended [from heaven] to his mountain retreat, where they instructed him in Taoist teachings. One day he was about to attend a meeting with Laojun on Mount Hua [the sacred peak in Shaanxi province]. Li said to his disciple, "My physical body will remain here - if my ethereal soul [hun] does not return in seven days, you may cremate my body." On the sixth day the disciple's mother fell ill and he had to rush home, so he cremated the body. On the seventh day Li's spirit returned, but his body was gone and he was not pleased. He thereupon possessed the corpse of a man who had starved to death, and rose up. Because of this, his form is that of a crippled man... He is, as a result, usually identified by his 'iron-crutch' and a gourd vessel; he was depicted as a lame or crippled beggar, hence the 'iron-crutch', and disheveled clothing, and his gourd vessel was a symbol of the joining of heaven and earth in the adepts own body.