Page 284 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Notes to the text

Chapter i the royal family. Sec his The Archaeology of Ancient China,
p. 255. David Keightley (journal of Asian Studies XLI, 3
1 . This is not in fact a very ancient legend, for in early
[May 1982]: 552), however, believes that this "bold and
times the Chinese had no creation myths at all, believing,
imaginative hypothesis" needs more evidence before it can
rather, in a self-generating cosmos. Frederick Mote, Intel-
be substantiated.
lectual Foundations of China (New York, 197', PP- '7-'9)
3. S. Howard Hansford. ChineseJade Carving, p. 3 1.
follows Derk Bodde in suggesting that this myth may even
be of non-Chinese origin. But the fact that it became so
Chapter 3
well accepted suggests that it fulfilled a need at least the
popular level. 1 . Arthur Walcy, The Book of Songs (London, 1937), pp-
2. Carbon- 1 4 dates cited in this book are corrected ac- 282-83.
cording to the chronology of the bristlecone pine, but even 2. Slightly adapted from Bernhard Karlgren, A Cata-
these should be treated with some caution. logue of the Chinese Bronzes in the Alfred F. Pillsbury Collec-
j. The prehistory of eastern China between the Yellow tion, p. 105. The last sentence makes it clear that the bronzes
River and the Yangtsc is still the subject of much debate. were made for ritual use rather than for burial.
For years we accepted Kwang-chih Chang's "Lungshan- 3. Just how difficult it is to date early Chinese jades is
oid" as a convenient label for the pre-Lungshan cultures in shown by the discovery in a Neolithic grave at Hsi-hsia,
this area. Some Chinese scholars now consider the duster Pu-chiang. Kwangtung Province, of two jade tsung very
of sites in the Ch'ing-lien-kang area as distinct; others similar to the piece illustrated in Figure 49, which has hith-
would stress two main areas: Ta-wen-k'ou leading into erto been dated in theearlyChou Dynasty. See Wen-wu 1978.
Lung-shan in Shantung, Ho-mu-tu and its successors in p. 15.
Kiangsu, with Ch'ing-lien-kang sharing features of both.
For a convenient summary, see Cho-yun Hsu, "Stepping Chapter 4
into Civilisation: The Case of Cultural Development in
1. It was Arthur Waley in An Introduction to the Study of
China," National Palace Museum Quarterly XVI, I (1981):
Chinese Painting (London, 1923, pp. 21-23) who first
1-18.
pointed out the importance of Ch'u in the emergence in an-
cient China both of creative art and of a consciousness of
Chapter 2
the power of the artistic imagination. More recently, David
I. Mizuno Seiichi, Bronzes and jades 0) Ancient China, Hawkes discussed the contribution of Ch'u in his Ch'u
pp. 8-9. Tz'u, the Songs of the South (Oxford, 1959). This has since
1. Bernhard Karlgren, studying the form and decora- been amply confirmed by excavations not only in Chang-
tion of a large number of Shang bronzes, divided them into sha, which was a relatively unimportant town, but in
two styles, A and B, though he could not explain why there Chiang-ling, the Ch'u capital, and Hsin-yang. The discov-
should be two styles. Kwang-chih Chang has suggested a ery in 1980 near Chengtu in Szechwan of a timber tomb
simple solution to the problem. He has shown that the very similar to those at Changsha shows how far the influ-
Shang rulers had a dualistic system whereby the succession ence of Ch'u had spread by the Western Han period.
went to two different groups of the royal house alternately, 2. David Hawkes, op. cit . . p. 108. The phrase hsi-pi, in-
there were two traditions of the oracle-bone scripts, two dicating the Western origin of these buckles, may be de-
parallel rows of ancestral halls, two clusters of royal tombs. rived from the Turkic-Mongol word sarbt.
It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the two bronze 3. See Su T'len-chun, "Report on the Excavation of a
styles were associated with these two lines of succession in Warring States Tomb at Sung-yiian-ts'un, Ch'ang-p'ing
265
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