the standing deity cast with eight arms and eleven heads, arranged in three tiers, surmounted by one head with a wrathful countenance topped by a small head of Amitabha, the principal hands held in anjalimudra, the other six fanned out, one holding a kundika, the figure adorned with jewellery with a deer skin draped over the left shoulder and clad in a shawl and a two-layered dhoti with finely chased borders, all raised on an oval lotus pedestal with beaded edges

This superbly cast Imperial gilt-bronze eleven-headed form of the popular bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara has long been regarded as the patron deity of Tibet, and has been revered in China from the late Ming dynasty through the Qing. For another eighteenth century Qing dynasty eleven-headed Avalokiteshvara, see Ulrich von Schroeder, Indo-Tibetan Bronzes, Hong Kong, 1981, p. 553, pl. 158C.