Page 30 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

8 Pitcher. Greyish-white pottery. Pottery sites, such as Ch'i-chia-p'ing in Kansu, dated by carbon-
Excavated at Wet-fang. Shantung. 14 to around 2000-1 750 B.C., simple artifacts of pure copper begin
Lung-stun culture, late Neolithic
period to appear, heralding the dawn of the great Bronze Age culture that
will be described in Chapter 2.
Though often beautifully made and finished, most of the stone
implements of late Neolithic times were utilitarian objects such as
hoes, scrapers, and axes, one of the latter being the ancestor of the
ieo-typc dagger axe of the Shang Dynasty (p. 27). The finest of
these implements were made of polished jade, a stone which be-
cause of its hardness, fine texture, and purity of colour was des-
tined to become an object of special veneration in Chinese cultural
history. Among Neolithic jades arc bracelets (huan), penannular
rings (chueh), and half-rings (huang), a flat disc with a hole in the
centre (pi) and a ring or short tube squared on the outside (tsung).
In later historic times these shapes acquired a ritual or ceremonial
function, the pi and tsmig, for example, symbolising respectively
heaven and earth; but there is no means at present of knowing
whether they already had this, or indeed any, symbolic meaning
in the late Stone Age.
Cc