Page 29 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

duced by the Chinese Neolithic potter. There was much plain red 7 Funerary um Pottery decorated with
red and black -Uy Excavated at Pan-
ware and even more coarse grey ware representing an all-pervad-
shan. Kansu. Yang-shao culture,
ing continuation of the earliest ceramic tradition in China. To the Neolithic period.
art lover, these grey wares arc often of interest more for their leg-
acy than for any intrinsic merit they may possess, for later we will
find some of these shapes, notably the ting and li tripods and the
hsien steamer (a pot with perforated base standing on a /<), adopted
in the Bronze Age as ritual vessels used in the ancestral sacrifices of
the Shang Dynasty; while the technique of impressing designs in
the wet clay, which later developed, particularly in eastern China,
into a sophisticated language of stamped motifs, also played its
part in the decoration of the bronzes.
As we move westward again from Shantung into Honan, we
find black Lung-shan pottery in strata overlying the earlier Yang-
shao and representing a still later stage in the development of the
Neolithic culture of the Central Plain. In some of the latest Black
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