The Burnished Gourd and an Unexpected Travelling Companion

From the Pathfinder Collection Private collections are shaped not only by scholarship, but also by travel, accident, curiosity, and the lives through which objects pass. They sometimes preserve modest things larger institutions might overlook: objects gathered because they marked a journey, a memory, or a moment of recognition. The Pathfinder Collection, discussed in earlier articles in this series through maps, books, drawings, and printed works connected with Sri Lanka’s past, also contains humbler objects fashioned from natural materials such as gourds, terracotta, wood, rush, reed, and bamboo, from within and beyond the island: ordinary products of nature transformed by craftspeople into objects of utility, beauty, and memory. This article tells the story of four gourds in the family collection from Peru and China, two countries with long traditions of decorating and refashioning gourds in very different ways. The Ancient Peruvian Art of the Gourd In the mid-1980s, I visited Lima with my husband at the invitation of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. His influential book El Otro Sendero (The Other Path) argued that poor communities created substantial wealth through informal systems of housing, trade, transport, and enterprise, but that without legal title and access to official institutions much of it remained invisible or unusable as capital. It was while returning to the city centre from one such visit that I noticed a small outdoor market selling Peruvian handicrafts. Among the objects displayed were engraved gourds, or mate burilado, part of an ancient Peruvian tradition whose roots long predate the Incas. I asked our hosts whether we might stop. They were understandably hesitant: the economic situation was difficult, and we were obviously outsiders. Eventually, however, they agreed. The variety of gourds was almost overwhelming. They ranged from squat, rounded forms to more elongated shapes. Their burnished surfaces were covered with hand-engraved scenes: jungle animals, horsemen, village festivals, religious subjects, and episodes from daily life. The finest were worked with extraordinary detail and fluidity. On a curved surface, the hand must be steady, the pattern continuous, and the design adapted to a form with no flat page and little margin for error.

Seeing so many together opened my eyes to the artistic possibilities of the gourd: a vessel from nature transformed into a surface for storytelling, gentle observation, devotion, and memory. It was hard to decide, but I finally settled on a few pieces. A Find in Beijing A few years later, in the 1990s, I visited China for the second time. Tourism had become more common by then, unlike our first visit, when foreign visitors were still comparatively rare and bicycles far outnumbered cars in the cities we visited. While browsing in an antique shop in Beijing, my attention wandered away from the porcelain boxes and small ceramics to a beautifully burnished gourd. It had flat sides and a waisted body, pleasing to hold in the hand. On one side was engraved a tiger. On the other was a young Chinese boy, dressed in what looked to me like Ming-style costume, kneeling in deep concentration as he attempted to capture a cricket. Seated Poet or Cultivated Gentleman Japanese woodblock print of a seated poet or cultivated gentleman, late Edo period. Such literary prints often combined elegant imagery with poems written in kuzushiji, the flowing cursive script of premodern Japan. Pathfinder Collection. Photograph by the author. The object had a fitted wooden lid, pierced with several small holes and bordered with bone. I could not immediately understand its purpose. It was clearly not a bottle or box. Unable to explain it in English, the shopkeeper removed the lid and tilted the gourd towards my face. I almost jumped backwards. Behind a small metal spring, which both prevented escape and held its food, two alert insect eyes looked back at me, belonging to a large, plump-bodied cricket with a voice, I would later discover, out of all proportion to its size. Only then did I realise that the gourd was a travelling cricket cage. I do not know whether the cricket was the shopkeeper’s pet, his demonstration specimen, or simply part of the sale. But when he sold me the gourd, he explained that the cricket came with it. He fed it mainly on lettuce, he said, though it preferred apples. And that is how we acquired a new travelling companion. I had known, in a general way, of the custom in China and Japan of keeping singing insects in cages. At school we had been introduced to Japanese haiku through illustrated books, perhaps Harry Behn’s Cricket Songs: Japanese Haiku. I remembered poems in which small creatures carried the feeling of a season, and reproductions of scholars, poets, and quiet interiors. Whether I had actually seen a cricket cage in one of those pictures, or later supplied it from imagination, I can no longer say. What stayed with me was the idea that a small insect could bring the sound of the natural world into a room. Now, standing in an antique shop in Beijing, that half-remembered childhood association suddenly became real. In China, keeping crickets for their song can be traced at least to the Tang dynasty, and by the Song period it had developed into a sophisticated pastime associated with autumn, refinement, and cultivated leisure. In Japan, singing insects had entered poetry by the eighth century, while courtly enjoyment of captured insects seems to have developed especially in the Heian period. Crickets were kept in cages made of bamboo, wood, ceramic, ivory, jade, and gourd: from simple folk objects to luxurious pieces fitted with carved lids of jade, ivory, bone, or hardwood. The gourd was especially suited to the purpose: light, sturdy and portable. Some cricket gourds had special stands or were hung from hooks; others, like mine, were flattened for stability. The narrow neck served as a grip, while the pierced lid allowed air into the protected chamber. My own gourd was a modest example of this tradition, but that was part of its charm. It was an everyday object, carefully made, used, and still occupied. Midnight Serenades From Beijing our journey continued to Xi’an, then south through Guangdong and Shenzhen, and finally on to Shanghai. The cricket came with us throughout. For someone who had never really had pets, I was surprised by how quickly this small creature became part of my daily life. Yet unlike most pets, it was undemanding. It required little in practical terms: lettuce and apple appeared to suffice, and it did not even seem to need water. I soon discovered, however, that cricket-keeping had its challenges. I had always enjoyed the distant evening sound of insects outdoors. Indoors, beside a hotel bed, the effect was quite different. Our cricket possessed a clear, melodious song and a powerful sense of timing. It seemed to reserve some of its finest performances for the moment we were trying to fall asleep. On the first night, I moved the gourd into the bathroom and shut the door, hoping the walls would muffle its serenade. It sang by day as well as by night: in hotel rooms, on buses, and even on board our flight to Shanghai. I worried that it might irritate fellow passengers. Instead, people smiled knowingly, even approvingly. The little insect became an unlikely icebreaker. Fellow travellers, amused by our unusual companion, told us more about cricket keeping and its place in Chinese culture. What had begun as an amusing purchase gradually revealed itself as part of a living folk tradition extending back many centuries. The gourd was no longer merely an attractive object. It was a small vessel of sound, custom, and companionship. Meaning Lodged in Things I had hoped to take both gourd and cricket on to India, but I had no wish to test the patience of quarantine authorities with a live insect. It was time to part with him. On the lawn of the State Guest House in Shanghai, I removed the lid. The cricket did not move. Plump and well-fed on lettuce and apple, it appeared perfectly content inside its small insulated dwelling. I had to coax it gently out. At last it reluctantly stepped onto the grass, paused for a moment as if surveying its new surroundings, and disappeared into the greenery. I would never have imagined becoming attached to a cricket. Nor would I have imagined that the sound which had kept us awake in hotel rooms across China would become, in retrospect, the very thing I missed. What remains now in the Pathfinder Collection is an embellished gourd bearing a tiger on one side and, on the other, a boy in deep concentration as he attempts to catch a cricket, just as I had first seen it in the Beijing antique shop before the shopkeeper lifted its lid. But it is no longer only the beautiful object that first caught my eye. Its beauty was enlarged by what was hidden inside it: by the small living creature it sheltered, by the culture of cricket keeping it revealed, by the song that accompanied us by day and night from city to city, and by the childhood memory it awakened of haiku, scholars, quiet rooms, and the poetry of insects. There is a Chinese phrase, you yi yu wu — to lodge meaning in things. That is what the gourd had become for me. It is hollow and silent now, but it does not feel empty. It holds the memory of discovery, travel, sound, and parting: the moment when an object became more beautiful because it had become meaningful. By Jennifer Moragoda