These are the lions that guard the Chinatown arch, so they guard Chinatown too. I live in Chinatown and I’m glad to have them taking care of things around here.
The male is said to guard places and the female, people. The female is on the left and the male on the right. According to my sources (Wikipedia mostly), this is backwards; but these lions came all the way from China, so I think they ought to know.
The female’s paw rests on a cub.
The cub is hard to make out. It’s lying on its back with its feet up in the air. Its face is to the right in this picture.
The male has a ball under his paw.
The ball represents the Flower of life — according to Wikipedia, a geometrical figure composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles, which is supposed to have spiritual meaning. The cub represents the cycle of life.
Why don’t they look more like lions?
They’re hardly fierce, are they? They have muscular bodies, but their faces look like big poufty doggies with perms and flat teeth and receding hairlines.
One theory is that the idea of lions guarding temples was imported from India at a time when few people in China had actually seen a lion. Therefore the Chinese lion was modelled after a Chinese breed of dog — a chow chow, a pekinese or a pug.
I find this hypothesis just goofy enough to be believable. And they look like giant pugs to me.
A year ago today:
Pic 597
Prime Crime
October 8, 2009
Two years ago:
Pic 237
Sleeper
October 8, 2008
2 Comments
They look like chinese foo dogs.
Some people call Chinese lions foo dogs. Not in China though.
One Trackback
[...] see: The stone lions A year ago today: Pic 605 Gazebo October 17, [...]