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 Art in China

SECOND EDITION

Oxford H istory of Art

Craig Clunas has worked as a University. Hew-as appointed

curator of Chinese art at the Professor of th e Hi story of Art,
Victoria and Albert Mu seum, and Universiryof Oxford in 2007,
taug ht at Sussex University and where he is the first holder
the School of O ri cnral of the ch,1ir to spec ial ise in an
and African Studies, London from Asia.
oxford History of Art . . .
. f Art series arc up-to-date, fully 1llustratcd mtroductions to
Titles in t.1:e Oxford !hst01")'.~ n b leading experts in thei r field. They will appear regu-
Oxford History of Art
a wide var1~ty ?f subJC~tswr
larly, buildm~ mto an inter oc
hlngyand comprehensive series. In the list bclow,publishcd
tides appear m bold.

Architecture in the PHOTOGRAPHY

WESTERN ART United States The Photograph
Archaic and Classical Dell Upton Graham Clarke
Greek Art American Photography
Robin Osborne WORLOART
MilesOrvcll
Classical Art Aegean Art and
From Greece to Rome Architecture WESTERN SCULPTURE
MaryB=d&
John Henderson
Imperial Rome and
Christian Triumph
Donald Prc-.tiosi &
Louise Hitchcock
Early Art and Architecture
of Africa
Sculpture 1900-1945
Penelope Curtis
Sculpture Since 1945
Andrew Causey
Art in China
JasElsncr Peter Garlakc
Early Medieval Art THEMES AND GENRES
African-American Art
Lawrence Nees Sharon F. Patton
landscape and Western
Medieval Art Art SECOND EDITION
Nineteenth-Century Malcolm Andrews
Veronica Sekulcs
American Art
Art in Renaissance Italy Portraiture
Barbara Groseclose
Evelyn Welch Shearer West
Twentieth-Century Eroticism and Art
Northem Renaissance Art
Craig Clunas
American Art
Susie Nash Erika Doss Alyce Mahon
Art in Europe 1700-1830 Beauty and Art
Matthew Craskc Australian Art
Andrew Sayers Elizabeth Prcttejohn
Modem Art 1851-1929
Byzantine Art REFERENCE BOOKS
Richard Brcncll
Robin Cormack The Art of Art History:
After Modem Art
Art in China A Critical Anthology
1945-2000
David Hopkins CraigClunas Donald Preziosi (ed.)

WESTERN East European Art

ARCHITECTURE Jeremy Howard
Roman Architecture Indian Art
Janet Delaine Partha Mitter
Early Medieval Architec- Islamic Art
ture lrene Bierman
Roger Stalley Japanese Art
Medieval Architecture Karen Brock
Nicola Colds1rc:.1.1n
Native North American
Renaissance Architecture Art
Christy Anderson Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips
Baroque and Rococo Polynesian and
Architecture Micronesian Art
Hilary Ballon Adrienne Kacppler
European Architecture
1750-1890 WESTERN DESIGN
Barry Bergdoll Twentieth~Century Design
Modern Architecture Jonathan W oodham
Alan Colquhoun Design in the USA
Contemparary Je!Trcy L.Meik.le
Architecture Fashion
Anthony Vidler
Chris1ophcr Brcward
OXFORD
UNlVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY rRESS

Contents
Grca1 Clarendon Strttt, ?xford ox2 6or f the University of Oxford.
Oxfonl Uni,•ersity Pre~ 1,5 a d.epa_rtm:;::Cnencc
It furthers ihe Univers1tysobJecnvc. .
in research, scholarship,
:md cdue2tion by publishing worldwide m
Oxford New York I Kon Kar.tchi
Auckland Cape Town D:ircsSal:a:1m I- ~ng c· gN . b"
Kua.fa. Lumpur l\·bdrid ~1e~boumc Mc.•uco ity :uro I
New Delhi Sh:mghai T:upc1 Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austri:i. Br:azil Chile Czech Republic
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japin Po!:tnd Porru~
rr;cctn~porc
Greece

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukr.unc Vietnam

Oxford is a registered mde m:irkof~xford Uni\"trsity Press
in the UK and in ~rt.1inothercountncs
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction 9
0 Craig Clunas 1997 and 2009
The mer.ii rights of the :author ha\'C been assen ed.
D.ttabasc right Oxford Univt:rsity Press (maker)
Chapter 1 Art in the Tomb
This edition first published 2009 Neolithic to Bronze Age: 250C>-200 BCE 15
All rights mcrved. No part of th.is publication m2y be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or tr:msmincd, in 2ny form or by any means, The First Empires: 221 BCE-220 CE
without the priorpcnniss.ion in wriringofOxford University PttSs,
or as expressly pcnnittcd by law, or under rerms agrttd with the 2ppropriate North and South: 220 CE-589 CE 35
rcprographics rights organiution. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the 200\-c should be sent to the Rights Department, Tomb Sculpture: 4oo-650 CE 40
Oxford Uni\'Ctsity Press, at the address 2bo\'C
You must not circulate this book in :i.ny other binding or cover
:tnd you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cat.tloguing in Publication Data
Chapter 2 Art at Court
Data a\"ailable
Tang to early Song: 618-960 CE 45
Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data
D2t11. a,-ailablc Northern Song Court Art: 960-n27 CE 53
Trpcsct by SPI Publisher Services, Pondichcrry, India
Printed in China on acid-free p:ipcr by Southern Song Court Art: n21 1279 CE 58
C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd
Yuan Court Art: 1279-1368 CE 63
ISBN 978-o-19-921n.c.·1
Ming Court Art: '368-1644 CE 66
I J) 7 9 10 8 6 ,t. l
Early Qing Court Art: 1644-c.1735 CE 72
The Qinglong Reign: 1736-1795 CE 79
Late Qing Court Art: 1796-19u CE 84

Chapter 3 Art in the Temple

Early Buddhist Art 89
Buddhist Art: c.450-c.580 92
Religious Art of the Sui {s81-6i8) and Tang (618-906) Dynasties 97
Religious Art of the Northern Song Dynasty: 960-n27 n2
Southern Song Religious Art: u2 1 1279 n3
Buddhist Monks and the Elite in the Southern Song n7
 -- --
Buddhist Art in the Yuan Dynasty: 1279-1368 121 Notes 2_16

~ ,; Pnin~ ~l_i_:Fourt~c;;-;-h-F ift;~~th ~~ tu~c_s_ _ _123

- - - - - ---- 239
Religious Art of the Ming Dynasty: ~ 68-16.:1_4___ _ .!_ 27 List of Illustrations
Religious Art of the Qing Dynasty: 1644-1911 131
___ ___
.. --
245
Bibliographic Essay
Chapter 4 Art in the Life of the Elite
Calligraphy as an Elite Art 135
__ Museums and Galleries 254
Art and Theory in the Northern Song 141
The Southern Song (112 1 1279) and Yuan (1279- 1368) 144 Websites 256
The Ming Dynasty: 1368-1644 153

The Art and Theory of Dong Qichang: 1555-1636 160 Timeline 258
The Seventeenth Cennrry and the Ming--Qing
Transition
- ------------------ 162
The Qing Dynasty: 1644-1911
165
Index 269

The Nineteenth Century

Chapter 5 Art in the Market-Place

The-~ong and Yuan Dynasties: 960-1368 173

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644): Painting 175

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644): Printing 181

~ h.:_Ming Dynasty (1368-1644): Textiles and Crafts 185

The Amateur/Professional Problem in Late
Mi~g Painting 17 8
~----:- -- - - - -- - 2
The ging_Dynasty: 1644-1911
Prints and Perspcc~c
194
Shanghai in the ~eteenth Century
199
The Republic of China - -- --''------- - - - -- ---=?2
201
Art in the People's Rcpubli:: of
_China
__ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ ___:2:12
.::
Art in C hma since the 1970s
223

YI (.IJ ,_. r,.Nn

CON TE NT:, \ ti
 Introduction

'Chinese art' is quite a recent invention, not much more_ than a

hundred years old. Although the textiles, pieces of calli~raphy,
paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and other ~orks of art shown. m this
book date from a period of 5,000 years, the idea of groupmg this body
of material together and calling it 'Chinese art' has a much shorter
history. No one in China before the nineteenth centu'.'}' saw al!these
objects as constituting part of the same field of enqmry, despite the
existence of a long and sophisticated tradition of writing about art,
collecting art, and showing and consuming art by successive elites
within that country. Rather it was in nineteenth-century Europe and
North America that 'Chinese art' was created. It still exists in the West
as an object of study contrasted with an unqualified 'art', usually in
practice the European tradition, with its extensions into America and
other parts of the world. The 'National Gallery' in London and the
'National Gallery of Arr' in Washington, DC, despite the implicit
claims to comprehensiveness made in their titles, do not contain work
from China.
The creation of 'Chinese art' in the nineteenth century allowed
statements to be made about, and values to be ascribed to, a range of
types of objects. These statements are all to a greater or lesser extent
statements about 'China' irsel£ The ideas of the nineteenth-century
German thinker Hegel, who saw art as the soul of a people, here met
with the orientalisr notion of China as a homogeneous totality whose
essence could be known and described only by those who were not
themselves Chinese, to produce a particular way of writing 'Chinese
art'. This often stresses continuity at the expense of change, harmony
at the expense of contested uses of the same thing, and essential
homogeneity at the expense of difference. Or rather, difference between
China and 'the Western artistic tradition' is stressed, while difference
within the field of practice across rime and place in China is under-
played. Yet China is a physically immense country, covering numerous
climatic zones and ecological environments, where social and religious
ideas, the ethnic composition of the ruling elite, the geographical
locations of political power and of the major centres of population,
Oetailof62
have all undergone many changes over the period covered here.

INTRODUCT I O'.\l 9
 Dates
Dates are given in this book in the forms
'Before the Common Era' (BCE) and
t 'Common Era' (cE), in preference to

ec and AD. There are also references to

-. H 'dynasties', the successive imperial ruling
MONGOLIA houses which have always been used to
(~~-, structure time within the Chinese
ongolla \:"r Jilin • historical record. Dynastic names arc
Autonomous Region J). Jih
not the personal names of the imperial
, ,'\} '/:;::.,/~ . family-the emperors of the Tang

o/y
~- Shenyan
1( Hebel r Llaonln& dynasty were surnamed Li, for example.
,->.,,;::; Most early dynastic names arc
.:.~ 8eiP.!1V
(Peking) geographical ones, often the names
y> of titles held by a family before they
reached the imperial throne. The names
Qinahal tuindona of the last three imperial dynasties arc
,;f symbolic attributes; Yuan, Ming, and
:t:
JAPAi
Qingmean 'Primal', 'Bright', and 'Clear'
_ Jlangs\
respectively. Charts of dynastic dares,
t ' " ' -"'\..~
. ' "1
21:~Q. including those found in this book, give

-
Autonomous .... -...'-, Anhui • ~ ~~(Nankmgl
Region
Sfchuan
, Hubel ...,..
f •• ,. ._ _
Shanghai an unrealistically tidy impression of
~ Hangznou historical progress, with each dynasty
• ,~Zhell'"}i following its predecessor without any
gap. Nor do they accurately represent
Hunan Jiangxi ,::!~
1I
ff' periods when political power was

q•Ta:~n
Gulzhou \..,_ Fujian ) ' • .
divided between rival ruling houses. Oetailof40

:;J~ ;£. A given emperor's reign could contain as in 'the Qi.anlongemperor' (r. 1736-95
Guanidon1 ')"=" a number of'eras', each ofwhich carried CE). These reign names are the chief
• GuangzhOu (Canton)
an auspicious name. From the Ming way ofdescribing a year, prior to the
•X1anggang
(Hong Kong) dynasty (1368-1644) there was only one twentieth century. Thus the inscription
era per emperor, and this is sometimes on 31 reads 'Made in the Xuande era of
used loosely to identify individual rulers, the Great Ming', equivalent to 1425-36
Hainan
CE. Xuande, which means something

Administrative Divisions like 'Proclaiming Virtue', is the name

This book is very deliberately called Art in China, and not Chinese of an era, not of a person. Beginning
of Modern China
A rt, because it is written out of a distrust of the existence of any as it did with the first day of the lunar
unifying principles or essences linking such a wide range of made Detail of 31 year, each era is not exactly coterminous
things, things of very different types, having very different dates, very with dates in the \.\/estem calendar.
different materials, and very different makers, audiences, and contexts The inscription on 37 is dated 'First ye:u
of the era', given here by
of use. Yet the choices of what to put in and what to leave out of a book
convention as equivalent to 1723 CE, eve n
remain co ntingent, since the number of illustrations and of words is though in reality it cove red only part of
limited by the author's energy, the reader's patience, and the economics 1737 and the very early pan of li38. Th e
of publishing. T he question 'What is art in China?' could really be dating of40 uses yet another system , of
rephrased as 'What has historically been called art in China, by whom combining one set of ten and on e set of
and when' ' That is one of the problems the book sets out to pose, if not twelve characters to givc .1 sixty -yea r
to answer fully. For even a quick examination of the existing literature repeating cycle. It reads '1n the dingyou
year of the Guangxu era, 1mddle ten day
shmvs that there are so many anomalies and inner contradictions in any period of the middle monrh uf spring,
definition of 'Ch inese art' that it can never be grasped as a stable or done by the impe rial brush' T his g ives
unc hanging enti ty, and can only be approached at all if we take into ..._
Detail of 37 a date equivalent to 181)7 C f. .

10 I N T RO D UCT I O N

I N T R O DUCTI O N 1i
HMrii but only the most formal is generally
a failing to meet the standards of quality necessary for_an introd~ctory
work of this kind. The principle I am using in selecting them 1s that
The Chinese language is rendered here
recorded in this book. Buddhist and they should be capable of sustaining discourse about the_ con'.exts of
in the Pinyin system of romanization.
ltshOlMbe borne in mind thatthis Daoist monks have special names what we now consider to be art in China from the very earliest times to
conveys contemporary st:1ndard
pronunciation ofthe written characters,
assumed by them at ordination.
Emperors prior to the Ming are referred
to here by their'tcmple names', titles
I the present. Many of them have been the subject of recen~ i~ovative
scholarship in English, which is detailed in the notes and b1~liography.
and that these were spoken very
differently in the past. Chinese personal assumed only after death, such as They are a starting-point, not a neutral sample. Most Chinese art of
names give the surname first: MiYouren 'Taizong', or 'Grand Ancestor'. j the vast span covered by this book is lost, but even so a standard
was the son ofMi Fu. Male members of Ming and Qing emperors arc called modern reference book lists over 13,000 named painters alone.' I have
the upper classes had many personal bytheir'era-names', such as'Ql~mlong I tried to give weight to what was articulated as art at t~e _time of its
names, used according to the social emperor'. Place names arc usual\ y
production, which means privileging calligr~p~y and ~amttng up to a
context (a custom also followed by given in their modern forms, or if an
earlier form is given, with the modern point, but I have also recognized that, with1? China as _much as
some upper-class women). Artists
! can thus be known by several names, equivalent. elsewhere 'Chinese art' now includes categones of matenal about
which n; such articulation was made, but where the conscious
account who is doing the categorizing and from what standpoint. manipulation of aesthetic effects is of major import~nce. This justifies
For example, Chinese elite definitions of 'art' over the last thousand the inclusion of both secular and religious sculpture m stone, where we
years have always given first place to calligraphy, though English- in fact have almost nothing of the views ofits patrons, and nothing at
language surveys often tend to devote less space to this than they do all of the views ofits makers, beyond what we can construct out of the
to sculpture, which is validated as a 'fine art' in the Western post- surviving physical evidence.
Renaissance tradition. Yet sculpture itself is a contested area. The The structure of this book requires some explanation, being neither
French scholar Victor Segalen (1878-1922), author of a pioneering fully chronological nor fully thematic, but it does not require an
work called The Great Statuary of China, refused to deal at all with apology. No frame of reference occurs naturally. The one deploy~d
Buddhist sculpture in China {which forms the bulk of the surviving here is scarcely more or less sustainable than any other. It takes as its
work in all media), on the grounds that it was 'not really Chinese', but point of departure contexts of use, the social and material circum-
rather an 'alien' import from India, and one which had had a wholly stances in which objects of art were created and used. One of the
deleterious effect on the purely native work which he claimed to ad- arguments for this is that it is an area which has received scant
mire so much. 1 attention in surveys of Chinese art until quite recently. In fact, in both
Similarly abrupt decisions have been made in this text, and it would the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions, 'art' and questions of
be curious if they were not challenged by readers. For example, there is function have been mutually exclusive categories until quite recently;
no discussion of buildings in what follows. Before the present century since the nineteenth century, a work of art has been something without
there is no discourse of 'architecture' as one of the fine arts in China a function, or something considered in the light of the removal or
but that does_ not mean that buildings were not the objects of just a; concealment ofits function.
much ae'.thet1c consideration as were other (equally under-theorized) The following chapters deal with the contexts of the tomb as an
areas which are included here. Decisions as to what to put in and what artistic site, the courts of rulers, the temples and altars of religious
to leave out are conditioned by the format of publication, but they are observance, the social life and interaction of the upper classes, and
not explained by it. finally with the idea of the market-place. These are not viewed as
The r_eadcr ;hould no'. thmfore think that the hundred and twenty mutually exclusive: many works could have been discussed under
or so tlungs illustrated m this book represent some time-honoured several of the headings, and a number of them are in fact referred to
canon of masterpieces, or an agreed list of approved art treasures. more than once. It has also been a priority to show how constructions
Rather they represent a variety of different life histories. Some were of meaning in a given object have changed over time. Its presence in
considered as works of art in the place and time where they were made, this book as a 'work of art' may perhaps be only the latest of a series of
and have continued to seem significant in all subsequent accounts such categories to which any given item has been subject.
down to the present, while others have had that status thrust upon
th em. only in our own century. Some of them, well outside the
tradillonal canon of'important' works of art, might be challenged as

12 INT RO DUCTION
I NTRO DUCT IO:-.1 IJ
 Art in the Tomb

Neolithic to Bronze Age: 2500-200 ecE

1 The way in which different meanings have been read into Chinese art
objects at different periods is brought out very precisely in a jade tablet,
now pr~served in the National Palace Museum on Taiwan [l] . The
stone is ivory yellow, with grey and ochre natural inclusions altered by
great age, and has been worked into a thin trapezoid shape, with a hole
bored in the narrower end. In delicate low relief, one side is worked
with the clearly defined figure of a plunging bird of prey, while the
other bears a more enigmatic stylized face, with prominent eyes. The
evidence of archaeology would now enable us to say that it was
probably made between about 2500 and 2000 BCE, and would
categorize it as the product of a culture, the L ongsh an culture
(c.3000-1700 BCE), which flourished at that period in what is now
China's province ofShandong, near the mouth of the Yellow River. Its
makers predated the use of metal, but jade ·was clearly of great
importance to them as a material for making tools and weapons, and
for manifesting the prestige of some over others in what was already a
stratified society. On the tablet is an inscription dated 1786 CE, written
by a Chinese emperor in whose vast collection of antiquities the piece
had by that date found itself. He provides a fa nciful explanation for the
two-sided decoration, understood by him as representing an eagle and
a bear, as a sort of ancient award for bravery, and assigns the tablet to
two of China's earliest historical dynasties, the Shang (c.1500 - 1050
BCE) or the Z hou (1050-221 BCE).
At this point a facile connection could be made with 'the Chinese
love of antiquity', depicting a people somehow uniquely obsessed with
interpreting their own long, illustrious past, a past conceived of as
unbroken to a degree paralleled by no other civilization. I would prefer
to stress the creative apprnpriation of this ancient object (much more
ancient than the inscribing empernr could possibly know), and its
insertion into what is effectively a new context, that of the imperial
collection, and imperial claims to legitimacy through the deployment
of ancient symbols of prestige, in a way which has no essential
diffe_rence from the way many other cultures have deployed prestigious
Detail of 13
architectural forms, art works, or collecte_d treasures of the past to

'5
:T ort what ar
tabletin t e a
'
e basically current projects. The location of the - d
. d d.
su Pp . h N tional Palace Museum, m ee its presence between h
f' . Ch" ' . .
of th"is book as an example o. art m.
Ja e
t e
ma, similarly repre sent
nme Chart of Periods and Dynasties Mentioned in this Chapter

I., covers
new contexts,
new meanings inscribed on 1t, as surely as do the po .
W .
effusions of the Qianlong emperor. e can try to mterpret how the
et1c
N EOLl'.l' HlC CULTURES
Liangzhu (Zhejiang/Jiangsu)
Longshan (Shandong)
c.3300-c.2250 BCE
c.3000-c.1700
object was originally conceived, but we cannot know what it 'really XlA DYNASTY (disputed, traditional dates) 2205 1818

means'. . fi db SHANG DYNASTY r. 1500-c.1050

,-- Jade, or more pre~ise_ly nephrite, was rst use y one of the_cultures I
ZHOU DYNASTY
, of the Chinese neolithic between 6000_ and 5000 BCE. A mmera] of 'VVestem Zhou c.1050170

U
treme hardness, it cannot be carved with a ~:ta! blade, but must be fSpring and Autumn Annals period 770-475
worked with abrasive sand in a procedure of slicmg and drilling which arcing States period 475~21
nvolves great expendi~re of t!me and skill. Therefore, at _a very early I QJN DYNASTY 221~07
period it became associated with power: temporal power, m the sense tHAN DYNASTY
of con;rol over resources, and by extens_ion wit~ sp!ritual power. By the estem Han dynasty 206 BCE-8CE

time the Longshan people were making theu highly advanced jade (Usurpation ofWang Mang) !r'-3
objects over 4,000 years ago, expl~iting nea~by sour~es of the stone, / Eastern Han dynasty 25~20
there was already a long and very disparate history ofJade-working in PERIOD OF DISUNITY
parts ofwhat is now China. The extent to which all these cultures were Three Kingdoms period 22o-280

'Chinese', or ancestors of the Chinese of today, remains a matter of Six Dynasties (in south)
speculation, coloured by political presumptions. None of them left any Westemjin

t ng
written record, and it is a highly dubious practice, though one too Eastern]in
seldom resisted, to use Chinese texts written several millennia later to 420--,9
Jade tablet oft he neolithic
period, c.2500-2CXX) BCE.
explicate the meanings and purposes of such early objects. This is Southern Qi
One of a number of forms particularly so with the case of 'ritualjades' like the illustrated tablet. Liang 5° 2-57
which replicate weapons It is one of a number of shapes found in Chinese neolithic graves and 55r-89
and fools in jade, the most
precious material then is without any immediate apparent function. Perhaps the most Sixteen Kingdoms (in north)
available. The hole perhaps distinctive objects of this type are found in sites of the earlier and more IN,n-thern Wei 386-535

I
indicatesanoriginal
southerly Liangzhu culture (c.3300-2250 BCE). These are flat disks, !Eastern Wei
fastening toa wooden
support, Ihough the angle varying greatly in size, and segmented hollow columnar objects, the Western Wei
at which this was done is angled corners of which are worked with what are among the earliest IN,n-thernQi 55<>-77
unknowable. The wood stand
and inscriptions date from the representations of the human form in that part of the world. These are Northern Zhou s5r-s,
eighteenth century cE. not counterparts of everyday tools, and it has been argued that they SUI DYNASTY 581-faS
may_ refer to the realm of the 'other', to powers beyond the mundane.
Their presence in graves (which may contain over roo jade objects)
constantly have come to light in the course of agriculture and other
suggests some connection with the marking of differentiated status in
earth-moving activities across a wide area of China, have often been
life, but much further we cannot go. There are names for these (the
construed as significant objects, as bearers of meaning. What has
disks are now called bi and the tubes cong) in Chinese ritual manuals of
changed is that actual meaning, to which as often as not the prestigious
much later date, together with explanations of their role in the worship written sources have provided enigmatic and endlessly fascinating
of Heaven and Earth, and as markers of hierarchical ranks on an guides.
aristocratic ladder, but the relevance of these texts to the neolithic The textual record, which has been unbroken since the early first
context is surely minimal. Instead of trying to make the evidence of millenium BCE, and which has always had prestige as a source of
matenal culture fit the (very much later) written evidence, it is cultural and political legitimacy, came to be read as containing a clear
preferable . to. acceptth e 1·1m1ts
· of'mterpretat10n
· m· relat10n
· to ob1ects
· of
such antiqmty. ' picture of the course of early Chinese history. First came a number of

What is worth noting is that these neolithic jades, which must

( individual culture-hero sovereigns, benefactors of humanity like Yu
the Great who tamed the unruly waters of China's great rivers, w hile
16 ART IN THE TOMB
i ARTINTHETOMB 17
 essities of civilized life (clothing, housing heterogeneous, and less ethnically pure ancient <?hina is forming
h
others ·inven ted alt e nee
.1mportandy writing) . I n t h.1s sc h eme, the first' around the extraordinary finds from excavations which reveal cultures
agriculture, b~t hso of Chinese history was the Xia (tradition all . · · f: from any of the
or ruling ouse, h Sh ( y of undoubted antiquity and sop h 1sncat10n ar .
dynasty, ) h were overthrown by t e ang c.1500-,. 1050 traditionally understood heartlands of Chinese culture. For many, tlus
2205-1818 BCE ' ": :rn overthrown by the Zhou (c.1050-256 BCE) multi-centred ancient China speaks to current needs more eloquently
who were in 1 .. . h. .
BCE), h Zhou and in order to eg1t1m1ze t e1r rule, that than the cohesive monolith of older accounts.
It was under t e were 'written. Scepticism · · ab out t h"1s account was None of these excavations is more potentially dis"':'p~ive _of the
h relevant texts f h. .
t e . .d ead in the early part o t 1s century, until it was standard accounts than those at Guanghan Sanxingdm, in Sichua_n
b coming w1 espr 1 . al .
e . . d b th discovery of the archaeo og1c remains of the late province, near the modern city of Chengdu. Discovered in ,986, this
reV1talize Y ·eta! of Anyang. Here were fiound ·inscnpt10ns · · ·in which upset all previous models of early Chinese culture, archaeology, and
Shang royal capt h Sh ki · art. Here, outside a city wall made of rammed earth, and contemporary
.. wees were interrogated by t e ang ngs, kings whose
the d1V1ne po hose of the now vin . d"1cated ancient
. h.1stonc . al sources with the Shang city of Anyang, two pits were located. The first dates
names matehed t · from c.1300-1200 BCE, the second from a few decades later. Amo?g a
.:ns the only early site to have produced a large body of
Anyang rem~ .
mass of burnt animal bones archaeologists found gold, bronze, Jade
. . n·o s ·,n the earliest form of the Chinese language, carved on the
inscnp n . . . stone, and pottery objects of a totally unknown type, of which the most
turtle shells and animal bones which a~te~ as P?Y~1cal points of entry to
the numinous world. Further, very bnef, inscnpt1ons are found too on spectacular to modern eyes are a group of life-sized bronz: heads from
bronze containers from the same site. the earlier pit and a huge single bronze statue 262 cm. high from the
The beginning of the making of objects in b~onze, an alloy of later [2]. Technically these bronzes are on a par with, or even surpass,
copper and tin, is still t~ken by some arc?a_eolog1sts to represent a anything done at Anyang, long thought to be the 'cradle of Chin:se
founding moment of Chinese culture, and 1t 1s undoubtedly true that civilization'. However, the aesthetic is strikingly different; the reacnon
vessels and weapons in this expensive material, made by a technique of many scholars, seeing these for the first time, was that they looked
involving skilled, possibly hereditary, groups of specialists show an 'un-Chinese'. In other words, they did notlook like the things that had
expansion in the types of resources which could be mobilized by early been used to construct an idea of'Chineseness'. Any representation of
rulers and their families. In the model advanced by the American the human figure on this scale at this date was previously unknown, let
scholar Robert Bagley, bronze-working technology was first developed alone the distinctive huge, staring eyes and sharply ridged noses of the
in the North China plain, the area watered by the Yellow River and its Guanghan heads, or the tensed posture of the standing figure, with its
tributaries, around 1500-1300 BCE.' Early Shang political power spread arms made to hold some now lost object in wood or ivory.
it out from there towards the south. Shang political control weakened Bronze standing figure from No written text refers to this culture at the time of its flourishing.
at the beginning of the Anyang period, 1300-rooo BCE, and was
Sanxingdui, over life-size, We do not know who they conceived themselves to be, or what their
c.1200 acE. Excavated in
reduced to its core in Henan. Southern bronzes, often in the form of 1986, the figure had been relations were with other contemporary state formations in other parts
animals such as tigers and elephants, do not depend on Anyang, but on deliberately broken and of what is now China. They were clearly in touch with bronze-using
dumped in a pit probably
independent developments of southern appropriations from the north containing the remains of
cultures further down the Yangtze river, and may have imported vessels
during the earlier phase ofinteraction. sacrificial animals. from there. We do not know how, where, or by whom the Guanghan
The picture of an early Chinese polity which was geographically bronze figure was used. These pits are not the tombs of human beings ,
and culturally united, with a strong and prosperous centre extending its nor do they contain the human sacrifices found at Anyang. The scale of
mfluence outwards to an ever-larger area, emerged from excavations the operation involved in casting bronzes and working jade suggests
sponsored by the Republican government at the Anyang site from rulers of power and wealth. They were not part of a 'periphery' of
1928 , and carried out by the first-generation of professional Chinese which Anyang was the 'core', and in studying the ways in which the
archaeologists. It was an ancient China which suited the needs of the culture differs from that of the Shang (no making of bronze vessels or
nhew and often fragile Republic for a usable past. Above all it supported bells, the prominence of the human figure), it is important not to think
t eaccountofearlyh·is tory given· .m t h e earliest
. wntten
. ' .
Chmese texts, of the Shang as the norm from which the Guanghan culture deviates.
,an dallowed At Anyang itself recent excavation has also considerably broadened
cl
. , a certain res0 1ut.ion of th e tension
. between the desire . for
mo
f,
ern,ty
d ' expressed h . .fi d.
as t e sc1ent1 c 1scourse of which archaeology and complicated the earlier picture of the Shang and their culture. In
orme part, .and the unw,·lli ngness to Jettison
• . .
the written hentage of particular, it has provided for interpretation objects in materials o ther
many centuries · Nowadays a picture . of a much more disparate, than the bronze and jade which dominated initial interpretations.

1
I8ARTINTHETOMB
ART I N T HE T O MH t9
 Fragments of white plaster walls, painted in red and black, have even
Ivory beaker inlaid with been recovered, to hint at the visual culture surrounding the Shang
turquoise, from the lamb of
!he Shang dynasty queen Fu rulers in their lifetimes. However most of the evidence still comes from
Hao, c. 1200 BCE. Found in a the goods surrounding the dead. The undisturbed tomb of the Shang
t,ox with other personal items
royal lady Fu Hao, wife of King Wu Ding, was discovered in 1976, and
immediately on top of her
coffin, itwas probably a dates from c.1200 BCE. We have no way of approaching the personality
precious possession used in or life of this woman, other than through the contents of her tomb.
daily life, unlike the bronze
This took the form of a single great pit, possibly with a built
vessels used in ritual feasting.
superstructure to protect it, provide a theatre for ongoing sacrifices,
and announce its presence in the royal mausoleum. Among its
profusion of over 200 bronze vessels, plus weapons and more than 700
jade items for ritual use and personal adornment, is a unique beaker of
ivory 131, an elegant concave tube inlaid with turquoise, the form and
decoration of which bear some relation to bronze objects but which
does not exactly copy any known example. The durability ofbronze has
put it right at the centre of all historical and modern understandings of
early art in China, but this beaker shows what is lost in wood or other
perishable materials, whose possibly equal value to their original
owners will never now be known to us. Bronzes were made in sets, with
objects of similar form differing in size and elaboration of decoration
due to the differing status of their owners, and the extent to which they
are comprehensible as sin le ob·ects rather than as integral parts of
t ose sets, use m roy feastin , sacrifices t ors an 1n t e
context of funer s, 1s mired, Sin le luxury objects may have borne
more ersonal meanm s or t eir owners, an t 1s parttcu ar case ma
have been a piece of exotica. vory was a oc uxury (the climate of
China was warmer 3,000 years ago, and elephants lived much further
to the north than they do now), but the turquoise was an import from
far away. As such it was only one of a number of exotic pieces in Fu
Hao's collection of possessions, which also contained 'antiques', in
particular jade objects, products of the neolithic cultures discussed
above which were already ancient by her time, as well as contemporary
facsimiles of ancient objects.
The beaker has a handle in the form of a bird, and is decorated with
monstrous faces . These are one of the most common motifs on Shang
bronze vessels, and are sometimes known anachronistically by the later
Chinese name of taotie, which means something like 'glutton' in the
language of the last few hundred years. These faces are horned, with
staring prominent eyes, and typically have two bodies, one stretching
out horizontally from each side. The interpretation of this and other
motifs has in recent years become a matter of renewed and vigorous
controversy among scholars. Some have argued that it can be read as
i ~ve of Shang mythology and culture, that it representstieWs
whose primary locus was elsewhere, in the oral or written literature ancl
ritual of the penod about which we are almost entirely ignoran t. Using

ARTI N TH E TO i\lD 21
I 1Ogyof struc tu
the metho d. O ofanune
are reflecnons
ralism (in which very disparate phenome
f .
d rlying structure o. meanings), they have
t this system of belief from the evidence f
na
4
Bronze vessel for wine,
d to reconstruc .h h h' . o dated 964 or 962 ace. Part
attempte Others associated wit t e art- 1stoncal traditio of a hoard of bronzes made
•·bronzes.• " 'h ··d n
surviV1ng . ce as 'formalism, ave mamtame that a for four generations of the
6 convemen . h ny same aristocratic family.
known or , external to the ob;ects t emselves should b
. • f 1eatures . e Thisincluded both vessels
discussion °
. uslyexcue, 1
d d and that it is purely techmcal features of th
h . .. I e
incurrent use and those
no longer deployed in ritual,
ngoro . together wit mtnns1c aws of stylist"
of casting, . . f h' 1c but presumably preserved
process h' h govern the distnbut10n o t 1s and other motif for their associations with
d elopment, w ic . Wh'l . s previous generations.
ev bOd of the material eV1dence. 1 e not arguing that these
acrossthe
. h Y h · Ii d
meaning, those w o me ne towar s t 1s approach h'
monfs ave no · h d b Ii ' fi · 'bl
. . h t we cannot read vams e e ers rom v1s1 e features
mamtam ta h •
of formal decoration. They thus accept t at we are never likely
to undersan t d how a royal owner such as Fu Hao may have con-
h' lik hi .
ceptualized the decoration on somet mg e t s ivory vessel • as
opposed to how she may have thought . about .the messages of power
and prestige embodied in the fact of its possess10n.
Bronze vessels of the Shang period have been preserved largely due
to the fact that they were buried in the tombs of the great of both sexes. group of specialized artisans, we do not know this for sure. We might
Their primary use at the time of their manufacture was in banquets in guess, given the sacred nature of the vessels, and the particular status of
temples at which sacrifices of food w~re offered to the royal ancestors. metalworkers in a number of analogous cultures, that there may have
They were buried with their owners m order that they could continue been something of the priest or the shaman about those who could
to sacrifice to higher powers even after they themselves had died and produce objects so central to the key concerns of the rulers, but the
become ancestors in their turn. The vessels were evidence of power, an sources again are silent. Nor do we know how the workshops in which
aspect which became even more sharply focused after the Zhou, a they were made were organized, for example whether they practised
people from west of the Shang kingdom, destroyed that kingdom any form of division oflabour, with different craftsmen responsible for
' around rn50 BCE. Zhou kings used gifts of bronzes, and of the metal. different stages of the process. What is better understood is the.very
necessary to make bronzes, as rewards to their followers, even ts which ---.. complex casting process by which early bronzes were produced. This
increasingly from this date are recorded in inscriptions cast on the involved the working in clay of a negative model of the finished vessel,
pieces themselves. Here bronzes were no different from jades, made in sections which then had to be fitted together with extreme
,I weapons, and chariot fittings, all the accoutrements of an aristocratic care (even so, external 'seams' on the metal show where the sections
lifestyle, as carriers of rank, and of the continuation of rank through were joined). A clay core was then fitted into the mould, and the
family. The earliest bronze inscriptions stress the fact that these molten metal was poured into the space between this and the external
'precious vessels' are to be 'treasured forever by sons and grandsons'. sections to form the vessel. Finally, the external sections were
Such mscnphons may transcribe formulae uttered during theimial dismantled, surplus metal was filed off and the object was complete.
~anquets in which food was ottered to the ancestors. Such early Zhou When brand new, Shang and Zhou bronzes would have shone
mscnptl?ns are inside the vessels, where they woulcll)e covered when in brightly, without the green oxidization patina which is now part of
use, and it may therefore be that they were intended for the eyes of the their aesthetic appeal. Although this procedure would theoretically
anceStors as much as to impress the living participants. allow for the reuse of moulds, there is perhaps surprisingly no evidence
We can construct something of how these bronze vessels of the that this was ever done.
Shang. and Zhou e'lites were understood by their owners and we can Certain similarities in form and decorative motifs between Shang
say quae a lot too about how they were made. About their makers we and Zhou bronzes have acted until recently to mask significant
are
. d' much
'd more ·ignorant. The vessels never carry the names of differences in the way they were used, and thus most probably in the
m 1v1 ual makers or Of workshop organizations and while we can way they were understood by their users. This amounted to what has
argue byanalogy f, 1 ' been described as a 'ritual revolution' taking place in the years around
rom ater sources that they were made by a hereditary

1 22 ARTJNTHETOMB
ART I NTli ETOM I! 2J
 Archaeological Sites down lo 900 BCE. ~nzes became plainer in decoration and more extensively
the Han Period
inscribed (sometimes now on the outside), as explicitwordin~placed
elaboration as the chief marker of the owner's power and prestige.
MONGOLIA
-Several shapes of bronzes went out of use altogether. Sets of bronzes
were still buried in tombs, but they also became the subject of a
different kind of deposit, the hoard, in which no human burial was
involved, and the objects present were heterogeneous, rather than part
of a ritually specified set. The large bronze vessel for wine shown [41 is
part of the largest such hoard to be excavated, 103 pieces found in 1976
at Fufeng Zhuangbai, in Shaanxi province. A pit contained the
precious heirlooms of a family of court scribes, that of Lord Xing of
Wei, buried c.900-800 BCE to preserve them from danger at a time of
political instability and never recovered. As the v~ssels from their
ancestral altars, the hoard comprised a set of recently made pieces for
current use, plus others of particular importance to the family from an
earlier period. This wine vessel was such an antique, inscribed as
having been made in the nineteenth year of the Zhou king Zhao,
equivalent to 964 or 962 BCE by the traditional reckoning. It was thus
some hundred years old when it was buried. The extent to which
purely aesthetic appreciation, apart from its associations with a revered
ancestor, mandated its preservation, is doubtful, but this does not
mean that awareness of such issues was entirely lacking. Clearly some
bronzes were better made, grander, more fulsomely inscribed, or more
highly decorated than others. They were almost certainly understood
as being so, with consequent meanings attached, and in this type of
discrimination we have the beginnings of the conditions necessary for
the concept of art.
As the archaeological record gets richer in the course of the first
millennium BCE, ~vides evidence for the progressive uncoupling of
bronze vessels from relig10us observance, as they become associated
~ a d with a realm of display and luxury consumption. In later
Chinese historical periodization, the shift from the era of the 'Spring
and Autumn Annals' (770-476 BCE) to that of the 'Warring States'
(475-221 BCE), which take their names from chronicles of the period, is
marked by the decline of any respect for the central, sacral authority of
the Zhou kings, and its replacement by a regime of vicious and
permanent conflict between numerous contending political entities of
Taiwan
varying sizes. This culture of competition extended to the material
realm, as lavish ·clisplay at inelarge number of regional courts became
· one of the means by which a ruler's prestige was asserted and
maintained in tneface of both friends and nvals.
Something of this court culture can be reconstructed from the
MetropoJ1tanc1tY •
contents of the tomb of Yi, Marquis of Zeng, a small state in modern
Archaeological site Hupei province, who died around 433 BCE ('Marquis' is used, like
'Duke' and other titles, as equivalents of a Chinese hierarchy of rank) .

24ARTJNTHETOMB
ARTINTH E TO MB 25
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