Antique Chinese Bone Engraved Cricket Cage. Depicts children at play in the fields around their home. No lid. 

Size: 2 X 2 X 4 1/4 in. 

#4840 . 

Keeping crickets as domestic pets, particularly the singing cricket, became a common practice in early Chinese antiquity. The ancestors of modern Chinese people possessed a unique attitude towards small creatures, while most other cultures studied and conquered big game: large animals, birds, and fishes. They were more interested in insects than in most other wildlife, partially due to the religious concepts they engaged with that emphasized mankind’s miniscule yet intrinsic place in a much broader universe, rather than the Western human-centric view of creation. Insects, rather than mammals or birds, became symbols of bravery (mantis) or resurrection (cicada), and became a precious economic asset (silkworm). Between 500 and 200 BC the Chinese compiled Erya, a universal encyclopedia which prominently featured insects. The Affairs of the Tsin-Tao (742-756 AD) mention that “whenever the autumnal season arrives, the ladies of the palace catch crickets in small golden cages… and during the night hearken to the voices of the insects. This custom was imitated by all the people.” The oldest artifact identified as a cricket home was discovered in a tomb dated to around the mid 10th Century, and in the 12th Century cricket fights became extremely popular. By this time, as evidenced in a painting housed in the Field Museum of Natural History, even Chinese children had already developed the art of making clay cricket homes, the skills of careful handling of the insects, and the practice of tickling to stimulate them. Singing and fighting crickets were the favorite pets of many Emperors of China. The noble pastime attracted the educated class, resulting in a wealth of medieval treatises on keeping crickets. The oldest one, The Book of Crickets (Tsu chi king), was written by Kia Se-Tao in the first half of the 13th Century. It was followed by the Ming period books by Chou Li-Tsin and Liu Tong and early Qing Period books by Fang Hu and Chen Hao-Tse. Wooden cages made of tiny rods and planks were once the most common type of insect house. Ceramic jars or pots with flat lids, introduced in the Ming Period, are still the preferred type of container for keeping the cricket in summer. Crickets that survive to winter were kept in a container made from gourds with carved lids of jade, coconut shell, sandalwood, or ivory. By the Imperial era cicadas and grasshoppers were also kept as pets, and cricket fighting was so popular among the commoners of Beijing that the court began to collect prized fighting crickets in exchange for waived taxes and dues, as was retold by Pu Songling in A Cricket Boy (early 18th Century). At the end of the Imperial era Empress Dowager Cixi revitalized cricket fighting by staging contests between cricket breeders. A cricket of her successor, the infant Emperor Puyi, became a key plot device in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy Award-winning film The Last Emperor (1987). The ancient secrets of cricket handling and cricket-related crafts, only some of which were recorded on paper, were largely lost during the Chinese Civil War. From 1949 to 1976 the Communist regime suppressed cricket keeping, which was deemed an unacceptable distraction and a symbol of the past. Cricket trade was banned altogether in the 1950s, but continued secretly as dozens of illegal markets emerged in the 1980s. In 1987 the government capitulated, formally allowed trading crickets on the Liuhe Road. By 1993 there were five legal markets, and in the 21st Century Shanghai has over 20 cricket markets, a testament to the long and vital history between the Chinese people and their past.