An old man and a child stand beneath a pine tree in the foreground depicted on the top of this rectangular box. The old man opens his mouth as if speaking. The child, with his back to the viewer, points up. There, amid the hills, an old man sits and gazes at the cloud-wrapped mountains in the distance. The scene illustrates the following T'ang dynasty (618-907) five-character quatrain:
Beneath the pine I ask the child,
Who says his master has gone gathering herbs.
But here in the mountains,
He cannot find him among the thick clouds.

        The composition closely resembles "The Burden" (Palace Museum, Peking) by the Ch'ing court painter Chin T'ing-piao. Though the media differ, the carving technique for the texture of the rocks and mountains is evocative of Chin's axe-cut texture strokes. Like the brush, the knife leaves behind visible cuts instead of the polished effect in earlier carving. This aesthetic similarity between lacquer carving and painting reflects an effort to integrate painting and objet d'art during the Ch'ien-lung period. Since Sung (960-1279) and Yuan (1269-1368) dynasty artisans strove to hide knife cuts by making them smooth and rounded, the technique used here represents a significant development in the art of lacquer carving at the time.

       The eight panels on the sides of the box are carved with different designs of antiquities. A six-character inscription ("Ta Ch'ing Ch'ien-lung nien chih") in gold on the bottom of the box dates it to the reign of Ch'ien-lung Emperor. The interior and bottom of the box are in black lacquer. This piece is representative of one of the carved red lacquer styles prevalent during the Ch'ien-lung period.