A rare Chinese horn and lacquer lantern, Qing dynasty, presumably late 18th or early 19th Century.

Soame Jenyns, R: Chinese Art, compare Fig. 149, p.179, Horn lantern, late 18th or 19th century, British Museum (not complete). "The horn lanterns of China early attracted the attention of Europeans, and in 1755 Pierre d'Incarvill wrote his "Mémoire sur la manière singulière dont le Chinois fondent la corne à la lanterne". In the account of his embassy to the court of Peking in 1794 Lord Macartney describes lanterns used in prodigious numbers, made of silk gauze or horn. In those of horn the joints of the sheets of the material were not to be detected. He writes 'The usual method of managing them, according to the information obtained on the spot, is to bind the horn by immersion in boiling water, after which it is cut open and flattened; it then easily scales and is separated into two or three thin laminae or plates. In order that these plates should be made to join, they are exposed to he penetrating effect of steam, by which they are rendered almost perfectly soft. In this state the edges of the pieces to be joined are carefully scraped and slanted off so that the pieces overlapping each other shall not together exceed the thickness of the plate of any other part. By applying the edges thus prepared immediately to each other and pressing them with pincers, they intimately adhere, and, incorporating, form one substance, similar in every respect to the other parts, and thus uniform pieces of horn may be prepared to almost any extent".