Page 117 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

a thin cord drawn through a perforation at the end
and another drilled in the finial. Such an attach-
ment would make for a swinging motion as the
wearer stepped or turned, producing a sound as
the pendent struck the other pieces of jade.
The Taosi hair ornament, which was unearthed
from a female burial, stands as an amazingly early
precursor in the long history of very imaginative
and artful jewelry that has continued in China
almost to the present time. As a personal ornament
it is not unique among the finds at Taosi sites.
During excavations conducted in 1997 and 1998
at a Taosi cemetery at Xiajin, near Linfen, slightly
north of Xiangfen, nearly 500 graves were un-
covered, among them a number of elite burials. 2
From the burials of two female elders have come
elaborately inlaid bracelets. The largest and most
astonishing of these is the one from M 76, which
measures 9 centimeters in height. Its surface, like
the spherical element on the hair ornament, is
covered by a mosaic of turquoise chips, and it is
further embellished by three contrasting inset
ovals of white stone. 3 LF-H

1 Excavated in 1980 (M 2023:1 - 3); unpublished. Gao Wei,
head of the Taosi excavation team, Institute of Archaeol-
ogy, CASS, has indicated that, in addition to the hair
ornament, Tomb 2023 contained a bracelet inlaid with
turquoise and a painted pottery ping. Gao has suggested
that the hair ornament is a percursor to later hair orna-
ments called buyao (literally, "swinging when walking").
2 Zheng 1998, 4 -13; frontispiece and color pis. 1-2.
3 According to the excavation report, the bracelets are
made of a black rubbery substance (Zheng 1998,10).
Whether this substance is related to lacquer has not been
determined. The report makes no reference to the possi-
bility that the substance might originally have been the
coating of some underlying material, such as wood or
woven fibers.
The elite burials at Xiajin, so richly provided with
personal ornaments and jade ritual implements, lack the
usual collection of pottery vessels and other accouter-
ments. In each grave only a single vessel was found. All of
these vessels are of one kind: a tall, slender gray-ware ping,
of exceptionally distinguished appearance, painted partly
red (Zheng 1998, color pi. 12).

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