In front of the gates of traditional buildings - palace halls, old government offices, mansions and other houses of style - one can still see a pair of lions standing guard. Carved out of stone, they are a male and a female, with the male on the left, his right paw resting on a ball, and the lioness on the right, her left paw fonding a cub.

The lion was thought to be the monarch of the animal kingdom, and its images represented august power and formidable prestige to keep all quarters in awful submission. The ball played by the male lion symbolized the unity of the empire, and the cub below the female thriving offspring.

Use of the lions was not the exclusive privilege of the court. Other personages of rank could also have them in front of the main entrances to their houses, with their ranks indicated by the number of lumps representing the curly hair on the head of the animal. Lions with 13 lumps, the highest number, guarded the houses of officials of the first grade, and the number of these lumps decreased by one as the rank of the official went down each grade. Officials below the seventh grade, however, were not allowed to have stone lions.

At the dawn of history China had no lions, whose habitat was Africa and West Asia. Official contacts with countries to the west were established after Zhang Qian (?-114 B.C.) was dispatched to Central Asia as a special envoy by Empoeror Wu of the Han Dynasty. In A.D.87, when Emperor Zhang of the Eastern Han reigned in China, the King of Parthia presented a lion to him; the next year, another was presented to the Chinese court by a Central Asian country known as Yuezhi to ancient China.

The existence of stone lions may have preceded that of real ones. It is believed that the earliest stone lions were sculpted at the beginning of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 A.D.) with the introduction of Buddhism into China. Sakyamuni (founder of the faith), it is said, was seen after his birth "to point to Heaven with one hand and to Earth with another, roaring like a lion,'Between Heaven and Earth I alone am supreme'." Elsewhere it is also said that "Buddha is a lion among men." "Buddhists admiring the Hon for its mighty swiftness made it the mount for the Bodhisattva Manjusri." In short, the lion is regarded in the Buddhist faith as a divine animal of nobleness and dignity, able to keep off evils and protect the Truth.

For the same reason, it was a custom to use figures of the lion to decorate certain structures, especially stone bridges. A most prominant example is the Lugouqiao or Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. Adorning the heads of its stone balusters are 501 lions of varying sizes and postures.

As further proof of the general liking for the animal, the knobs of seals are often sculpted in the form of lions. Among folk dances, the lion dance which was known as early as the Han Dynasty has remained popular ever since.