This imposing figure is part of a group of finely crafted Chinese architectural ceramics in the museum’s collection. It served as a ridge tile on a prestigious building, but it is no longer possible to determine exactly which roof it adorned. A very similar ridge turret in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich was described in 1917 by the art dealer Hugo Meyl as an ornamental piece of a temple roof from Shandong province. It is also conceivable, however, that the tile shown here adorned the roof of a palace or tomb. The three inconspicuous characters “dongnanjue” (southeast corner) carved in the top of the dragon’s tail indicate the orientation of the tile on the roof.

The honey, green, and beige sancai glaze (sancai means “three colors”), which this piece has in common with many roof tiles from the Ming period (1368 –1644), can be traced back to Tang-period ceramic pieces (618 –907). In China, the dragon embodies life-giving powers. The base is decorated with stylized cloud swirls. People imagined dragons flying in the clouds and attributed them with power over life-sustaining rain. This idea also explains why this mythical creature was regarded as a symbol of the emperor. As a “weather deity,” the dragon was no doubt also seen as having power to protect against inclement weather.

Research into the origin and history of the ridge tile revealed in 2019 that it was formerly owned by the left-wing publicist and art collector Eduard Fuchs (1870 –1940), who was forced to flee Germany in 1933. His collection was confiscated by the National Socialists and auctioned off to a collector in 1937, from whom Carl Cords later acquired the piece. Cords’s donation in 1943, comprising more than 1000 predominantly Chinese objects, became a cornerstone of the Museum Angewandte Kunst’s East Asian collection. Negotiations are currently underway with Eduard Fuchs’s heirs about how the piece can be preserved for the museum.