Page 242 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

The first documented appearance of this facing-
bird design is on the Hui gui; its inscription dates
the vessel to the very end of the reign of King Zhao
2
(r. c. 976-957 BCE). Within a generation the de-
sign had reached its mature form, as exemplified
by the Feng zun. It appears as well in the Dong gui
discovered in a tomb one hundred meters to the
west of Hoard i; the gui's lengthy inscription, which
recounts its patron's repulse of an invasion of the
Zhou central state by enemies from the Huai River
region, dates the vessel to the thirteenth year of
King Mu (944 BCE) — about the date of manufac-
ture of the Feng zun and Feng you. Surprisingly, as
beautiful as the facing-bird design is, it seems
to have remained in vogue only very briefly: under-
stated remnants of it appear in narrow descriptive
bands beneath the lip of vessels manufactured over
the next generation or two (see, for example, the
Shi Qiang pan, cat. 81); by the end of the Middle
Western Zhou period, however, it seems to have
disappeared almost completely.
The inscription on the Feng zun, identical to
8o that on the Feng you, is dedicated to one "Father
Xin"—the temple name, according to the Shi
Feng bronze zun vessel Qiang pan, of Qiang's grandfather:

5
5
Height 16.8 (6 /s), diam. at mouth 16.8 (6 / 8) It was the sixth month, after the growing
Middle Western Zhou Period, middle of the brightness, yimao [day 52]; the king was at
tenth century BCE Cheng Zhou, and commanded Feng to meet
From Zhuangbai, Fufeng, Shaanxi Province with Da Ju. Da Ju awarded Feng metal and
cowries, and [Feng] herewith makes for
Zhou Yuan Administrative Office of Cultural Relics,
Father Xin this treasured offertory vessel.
Fufeng, Shaanxi Province
[Clan-sign]
The Wei vessels from Hoard i — particularly those This inscription shows that Feng was almost cer-
that trace the generations of the family — chronicle tainly the father of Qiang; since Qiang served at
important stages in the development of Western the court of King Gong (r. c. 917-900 BCE), Feng
Zhou bronzework, including the evolution of deco- must have been active two or three decades prior,
1
rative designs. The Feng zun, together with the c. 940-930 BCE. ES
Fengj/ou, with which it would have been paired in
the set of ritual vessels, is an excellent example of a 1 Excavated in 1976 (18); reported: Shaanxi 1978, 3.
2 For the Hui gui, see Shaanxi 1986.
facing long-tailed crested bird design, which for a
brief while seems to have displaced the stylized
animal-face design that had dominated Chinese
bronze ornamentation through the end of the Early
Western Zhou period.

241 | B R O N Z E S FROM Z H U A N G B A I