In the newly opened Tiger in Asian Art exhibition at Asia House in London there is a lithograph of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment of Foot defeating the Chinese troops at the Battle of Amoy in the First Opium War of 1841.
In contrast to the feathers and red metallic glints of the British uniforms, the Chinese are all dressed in what look almost like pyjamas. To their European enemies their stripy clothes with little ears on their helmets all looked rather comic. But to the Yuan dynasty troops, they were invoking the greatest source of natural strength they knew of: the tiger.
'We started thinking about doing this in time for the Year of the Tiger five years ago,' says co-curator Katriana Hazell. 'Tigers are so important in Asia, the tiger economies were doing well at the time, and we wanted to do something that was more than an art show.'
Several works show a tiger placed against a dragon. The tiger is yin (earth, valleys, wind), the dragon yang (heaven, mountains and water), and the two together symbolise the universe held in harmony, manifested through the science of fung shui, or wind-water.
So for example there is a statue of the Taoist god of medicine, with a dragon whispering in his ear and a tiger at his feet. The medicine deity helps those whose bodies are out of balance: he uses the power of these creatures to strengthen those elements that are weak, and weaken those elements that are too strong.
Tigers are elusive, and some of the treasures proved to have similar challenges. The hardest piece for the team to source was something to represent Tipu Sultan, the eccentric 18th-century Muslim ruler of Mysore, India, who chose a tiger as his symbol. Images of the animal were everywhere in his palace and he was most famous for a mechanical wooden tiger built for him by French engineers.