Page 28 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

5 Bowl. Pottery decorated with masks
and nets(?) in black slip. Excavated at
Pan-p*o-ts'un, Shensi Early Yang-shao
culture. Neolithic period
shao. Many Chinese scholars think that the marks scratched on
the Ta-wen-k'ou pottery, dateable around 2500-2000 B.C., repre-
sent the first true writing in China and arc the ancestors of the
bronze and oracle-bone script of the Shang Dynasty described in
the next chapter.
By about 2400 b. C. the Ta-wen-k'ou culture was shading imper-
ceptibly into the "Black Pottery culture" first found by Dr. Wu
Chin-ting in 1928 in Lung-shan in Shantung. Most famous
among the Lung-shan wares is a delicate pottery made of dark
grey clay burnished black and of incredible fragility, being some-
times as little as half a millimetre thick. The shapes are elegant,
while the decoration, consisting chiefly of raised bands, grooves,
and milled rings, gives it a somewhat metallic, machine-made
look. It must have been extremely difficult to make, let alone use,
for in the succeeding Bronze Age the tradition died out com-
pletely. Recent discoveries at Wei-fang in Shantung reveal that the
Black Pottery culture also produced a white pottery ofremarkable
vigour and originality, illustrated in Fig. 8 by the extraordinary
pitcher, called a k'uei, which seems to imitate a vessel made of
hides bound with thongs.
While the painted and black wares are certainly the most spec-
tacular, they represent only a small fraction of all the utensils pro-
6 Stemcup Black pottery Excavated at
Wei-fang, Shantung. Lung-shan
8 culture, late Neolithic period