Page 63 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

ja Mythical animal. Bronze inlaid with
silver. From a royal tomb of the state of
Chung-shan near Shih-chia-chuang,
Hopei. Warring States, late third
century B.C.

and Chengchow had for some years been robbing tombs at Chin-
ts'un. Bronzes believed to have come from these tombs range in
style from late, and rather subdued, versions of the Hsin-cheng
manner to magnificent examples of the mature style of the fourth
and third centuries B.C.
By the 1980s, many excavations had revealed the extravagance
of the feudal courts. The burying of no fewer than nineteen car-
riages with their horses in a Wei State royal grave at Liu-li-ko,
Hui-hsien, shows that the old Shang custom still survived, soon to
be superseded by the interring of models in pottery, bronze, or
wood.
The Chin-ts'un and Hui-hsien finds lay in the territory of a
powerful state, but not all the finest bronzes have been unearthed
from such sites. A royal tomb of the hitherto almost unknown
state of Chung-shan, opened south of Peking in 1978, yielded
huge bronze standards of a kind never seen before and intricately
inlaid bronze creatures, one of which is illustrated here; while
some of the most remarkable finds of recent years have come from
tombs of the tiny state of Tseng, which led a precarious existence
in Central China till it was swallowed up by Ch'u in 473 B.C.—but
not before one of its rulers had been buried with the largest and
finest set of bronze bells ever discovered in China. Such finds
show that the feudal rulers, however weak, used their bronzes not
merely as symbols of power but to display their wealth and high
culture to their neighbours and rivals. Perhaps the lack of this in-
ter-state competition when China was united under the Ch'in and
Han dynasties may help to account for the greater plainness and
uniformity of Han bronzes.
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