Chinese Toggle Depicting Shoe

Longer, lower, and busier on top, this carved clog-shaped box wears its pattern like armor.

This wooden toggle depicting a shoe is from China, and dates to the 19th century. It is wood. Shoes and footwear appear in Chinese decorative arts, sometimes as playful puns, since the word for shoe is often said to sound like the word for harmony. Elongated shoe-shaped container with a wide open cavity at one end and a sloped toe. Allover carved relief of vines, blossoms and small drilled dots covers the sides, in dusty red-brown. It is 1.5 inches wide, 3.75 deep and 1.75 high.

Every inch of surface has been talked into decoration.