Page 54 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

'
Cheerful arc the rooms by day,
Softly gloaming by night,
A place where our lord can be at peace.
Below, the rush-mats; over them the bamboo-mats.
Comfortably he sleeps,
He sleeps and wakes
And interprets his dreams.
Such ballads give us a picture of large buildings with rammed
earth walls standing on a high platform, of strong timber pillars
supporting a roof whose caves, though not yet curving, spread
like wings, of floors covered with thick matting like the Japanese
tatami, of warmth, light, and comfort. While the most monumen-
tal buildings were the ancestral halls, the palaces and private
houses were often large, and some already had several successive
courtyards as they do today. Chou texts are full of warnings
against those who build too extravagantly, and above all against
the usurper of royal prerogatives. Confucius, for example, re-
buked a contemporary who kept a tortoise (presumably for divi-
nation) in a pavilion adorned with the hill pattern on its capitals
and the duckweed pattern on its kingposts, insignia reserved ex-
clusively for the king. By comparison, the authors of these texts
extol the simplicity of ancient times, when a virtuous ruler roofed
his ancestral shrine with thatch, when King Ho-lu of Wu never
"sat on double mats. His apartments were not lofty . . .his palaces
had no belvederes, and his boats and carriages were plain."
The most conspicuous of Chou buildings, apart from palaces
and ancestral halls, must have been the Ming-t'ang ("bright hall"),
a ritual edifice of which detailed but conflicting accounts are given
in early texts, and the towers (t'ai) constructed of timber on a high
platform oframmed earth. Passages in the Tso-chuan show that the
princes used them as fortresses, for feasting, or simply as look-
outs. Perhaps they survived in the tall storage and lookout towers
that were, till recently, a feature of villages and farms in south
China.
No trace of the kind of decorative stone sculpture that adorned
Shang interiors has yet been discovered in Chou sites. But the
Chou craftsmen were certainly capable of modelling a figure in
the round and endowing it with extraordinary vitality, even
when, as in the famous pair of tigers in the Freer Gallery (one of
which is shown here) its limbs and features arc stylised. Indeed,
here the rhythmic movement of the semi-abstract decoration over
the surface gives these creatures a curious animation different
from, but no less intense than, that which a more naturalistic treat-
ment would have achieved. Although they have been tentatively
dated as early as the tenth century B.C., the coarseness of the mo-
delling and the overall baroque decoration seem to herald the style
of the middle Chou period.
THE RITUAL BRONZES In the earliest Western Chou ritual bronzes, the Shang tradition is
carried on with little change, one of the more significant differ-
ences being in the inscriptions. In the Shang, these had been sim-
ple dedications for offerings to the spirits. Under the Chou, their
34
Copyrighted m atonal