Basket for flower petal offerings

This basket, the oldest of the nine hundred works in the Cotsen Collection, is of a type used to hold flower petals scattered during a Buddhist ritual. Originally it was lined with silk fabric, fragments of which remain on the interior. The inside of the basket itself is made with fine hexagonal plaiting. On the outside is a central ring of circular plaiting whose strips are then finely split. These bundles are braided to create an openwork pattern typical of early keko.