Beijing cinnabar lacquer box and its base. Beijing cinnabar lacquer box, quadrilobed in shape. The lid is carved with a scholar and his servant in a landscape. The interior and base are black lacquer. The base is imperial yellow fabric.

The red color of the early 15th century was obtained using cinnabar as a dye. The complex floral pattern was created by building up numerous layers of lacquer and then carving them.
Lacquer was an East Asian craft. Chinese workers had been tapping the sap from lacquer trees since around 3000 BC. The filtered and purified lacquer was then applied to a base, usually wood, and colored.
Red lacquer, often called “Peking lacquer,” is made by applying many layers of lacquer to a base, either wood or metal. This highly delicate process requires remarkable patience and precision: the lacquerer must apply about twenty successive layers of varnish to achieve a thickness of one millimeter.

Two similar boxes in the British Museum, one belonging to the Capt. A. E. Johnston donation with a similar decoration and the other one, Collection Robert Wylie Lloyd with an identical shape.