Page 40 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

standards of taste set at court. In this exhibition the Thus, the Shujing portrays the final Shang ruler as
exquisite objects from the tombs of the royal
consort Fu Hao, the marquis ofYi, the king of
Zhongshan, and the First Emperor of Qin are the
most obvious examples of this. Even art not from
royal tombs owes much to the technical advances
made by artists and artisans in the employ of rulers
who demanded objects of the highest possible
quality and who could provide the material
resources required. That rulers had resources at their
disposal is probably best explained in terms of
political and economic history. But the way they
chose to use those resources has much to do with
conceptions of kingship.
The notion that properly there is only one supreme
ruler goes very far back in Chinese history. In the
late Shang known from the excavations at Anyang
(ca. 1200— I too bce), the king referred to himself as
'"The One Man" or "The Unique One," and seems
to have operated on the assumption that he could
command the obedience of everyone in the realm.
Above him, however, were powerful spirits,
especially his own ancestors. He was the
intermediary between humankind and these
whomcelestial powers, he served through sacrifices
of animals and even human beings. In the most
important cults the king acted as the head priest,
making the sacrifices and pronouncing the prayers.
He expended much of the wealth at his disposal on
the performance of these rites, and the
concentration of material resources in his hands was
justified on the basis of his priestly powers. That is,
he was the one best able to communicate with his
powerful ancestors through divination and
influence them through sacrifices, and these
ancestors were the best able to communicate with
the high god Di, and so for the welfare of the
entire society it was essential that he have the
material resources to perform the rites in the most
efficacious possible manner.
Sacrifices to ancestors and other divinities remained
central to kingship into the Zhou period
(ca. 1100-256 bce), but the most important divinity
of the early Zhou was Heaven. Heaven, perhaps
originating in a sky divinity, had by this time come
to be conceived as something like the sacred moral
power of the cosmos. Just as there was only one
Heaven, there could be only one true universal
king, the "Son of Heaven," uniquely qualified and
obliged to offer sacrifices to Heaven. The early
classic Shujing ("Book of Documents") portrays
Heaven as taking a direct interest in the
performance of the king. If he neglected his sacred
duties and acted tyrannically, Heaven would display
its disfavor by sending down ominous portents and
natural disasters. If the king failed to heed such
warnings, political and social disorder would ensue,
signaling that Heaven had withdrawn its mandate.
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
a dissolute, sadistic king who had lost Heaven's
favor and the Zhou conquerors as just and noble
warriors who had gained it. Kingly tendencies
toward ostentation were judged harshly. The charges
against the last king of the Shang included spending
too much on his personal enjoyment, taking
resources from the people to build "palaces, towers,
pavilions, embankments, ponds, and all other
extravagances"; 2 kings were not, however, criticized
for commissioning lavishly decorated bronze vessels
for use in sacrifices or for burial in graves, since
that was done for the ancestors.
To the contrary, bronze sacrificial vessels remained
an important symbol of lordship. Many early Zhou
vessels bear inscriptions showing they were
presented by the king to a lord to accompany the
Agranting of a fief. myth grew up about the
"nine tripods" created by the founders of the Xia
dynasty. These tripods symbolically united the
realm, as they were made of metal from the various
regions and decorated with images of animals
from all over. They also were attuned to Heaven.
When the ruler's virtue was commendable and
brilliant, the tripods would be heavy though small,
but when the ruler lacked virtue, they would be
light even though large. When the Xia dynasty
ended, it was believed, the tripods passed like royal
regalia to the Shang rulers, then centuries later to
the Zhou rulers. 3
Conceptions of the ruler as the pivotal figure in the
cosmos may well draw from very ancient ideas of
shaman-priests who intercede with celestial powers,
but by mid-Zhou times they were evolving in a
text-centered tradition, fashioned by literate court
specialists to suit the needs of rulers, nobles, and the
ruling class more generally. From the eighth
century on the Zhou kings progressively lost actual
power and regional lords grew stronger, but these
new circumstances did not lead to a new
cosmology that eliminated the need for a universal
king. Rather it led to a profusion of ideas on how
best to recover or recreate a central monarchical
institution capable of bringing unity to a politically
divided world.
To Confucius (traditional dates 551—479 bce), the
solution lay in getting rulers to act like true kings.
He held up as examples Yao and Shun, the sage-
kings of antiquity, as well as the more recent
founders of the Zhou dynasty, King Wen and King
Wu. These true kings were antitheses of the selfish,
aggressive, heavy-handed, vainglorious rulers of the
states of his day. The true king would honor the
ancient ways and rule through ritual (//) and moral
force (rfe). He would not overburden his people to
satisfy his own greedy desires for ostentatious
display or incessant conquest. "If a ruler himself is
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