Page 126 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

zoomorphic, or other images, like the human heads
and fish on a basin from Banpo near Xi'an, Shaanxi
Province (cat. 114). Most of this pottery was probably
made for practical use, although the more unusually
painted pieces may have had a ritual function.

More remarkable than the Neolithic potters' efforts

at painting are their ways of forming the clay.
Vessels in sculpted three-dimensional forms are very

rare, but occur in many different cultures. They
include human, animal, and bird figures (cats. 115,
116), whose primary purpose does not seem to have
been utilitarian.

Utility was certainly not a major concern of the
Longshan potters in the region of Shandong

Province who made some of the most beautiful

Neolithic vessels. Their tall black goblets in daring
shapes, turned on the potter's wheel, shaved to
eggshell thinness, burnished, and pierced with lace-
like openwork patterns (fig. 2), seem to have been
designed to overcome the solid, weighty quality of
the material. This imaginative and accomplished
handling of earthenware clay was never achieved
again in later periods. Yet even these most advanced
Neolithic pots are technically nowhere near as
remarkable as contemporaneous jades.

EARTHENWARE SINCE THE BRONZE Fig. 2. Goblet with eggshell walls and openwork stem.
Neolithic period, Jrd millennium BCE. Burnished black
AGE earthenware; h. 26.$ cm. Unearthed at Donghaiyu,
Rizhao, Shandong Province. Shandong Provincial
From the middle of the second millennium bce, Museum.
earthenware was little used for quality crafts. It still
had many other functions; all of them, however, represent an important step in the development of
were low in prestige. It was used at the building Chinese ceramics.
site, the foundry, and the tomb, for structural parts,
models, molds, and replicas. Potters made From the Warring States period (475-221 bce) until
the High Tang period (713—779) earthenware was in
earthenware roof tiles, wall tiles (cats. 103, 104), demand as an inexpensive, versatile, and attractive
water pipes, bricks, and other structural parts; the material for making replicas that played a vital role
wall tiles and bricks were mainly for underground in funerary practices: figures of men and beasts
structures, because Chinese buildings were held up (cats. 88-92, 96-97, 99-101, 105-7, 109). models of
structures (cats. 100, 102), and copies of objects of
by wooden pillars rather than supporting walls. daily life. These replicas were painted or glazed or
both. The figures substituted for the living beings
During the Shang (ca. 1600—ca. 1100 bce) and that previously had been sacrificed for important

Zhou (ca. 1100—256 bce) dynasties, China's Bronze burials; the copies considerably reduced the costs of
funerals by replacing more valuable goods.
Age, earthenware had the important but naturally

unglamorous function of supplying models and

molds for bronze casting. Bronze Age potters thus

left an imprint on the crafts of their time, but their

actual works were not meant to be preserved and

have survived in only a very fragmentary 2

state.

An exception is the white pottery jar from Anyang, The most remarkable aspect of this tomb pottery is
the sculptural quality of some of the figures. Since
—in Henan Province (cat. 117) a rare instance of a
burial goods were status symbols for both the
bronze vessel, presumably shaped after a pottery deceased and the survivors, they became more and
more ambitious over time. This trend reached its
model, being in turn copied in clay. 3 Beautiful but zenith in the High Tang period; grave figures of
that time can be strikingly naturalistic and lively
impractical, it is made of white earthenware of finer (cats. 105—7) or else highly imaginative and
quality and brighter color than that used for model
making, yet is similarly soft, porous, and brittle. Not elaborate in their modeling (cats, no— 11). 4 They
surprisingly, such pieces do not seem to have been
made in any quantity, nor for long, and they do not

CERAMICS IN CHINA. MAKING TREASURES FROM EARTH