Page 66 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

$8 Bell, po. Bronze. Deuil of
dei oration on top

59 Rack of bronze bells from the tomb
of the Marquis Yi of Tseng, Sui-hsien.
Hupei. Detail Warring States period.
no longer purely ritual (if indeed it ever had been) but had become
a prominent feature of the entertainment of the feudal courts.
While the aristocracy of metropolitan China were indulging in
music, dancing, and other delights in the comfort and security of
their great houses, those in less fortunate areas were fighting a des-
perate battle against the savage tribes who harried the northern
frontiers. Mounted on horseback and using the compound bow,
the nomads were more than a match for the Chinese troops, who
were finally forced to abandon the chariot and copy both their
methods and their weapons of war. Their influence on the
Chinese did not end with warfare. Their arts were few but vigor-
ous. For centuries they and their western neighbours of the central
Asiatic Steppe had been decorating their knives, daggers, and har-
nesses with animal carvings—first in wood, and later in bronze
cast for them, it is believed, by slaves and prisoners of war. This
animal style, as it is called, was totally unlike the abstract yet fanci-
ful style of the Chinese bronzes. Sometimes the modelling is real-
istic, but more often it is formalised crudely and without the typi-
cal Chinese elegance of line. With barbaric vigour the nomads of
to Striking the bells. From a rubbing of the Ordos Desert and the wild regions to the north and west of it
a third-century A. D. stone relief in the fashioned elk and reindeer, oxen and horses; they liked also to de-
tornbat 1 nan, Shantung, illustrated on
pict with compact savagery a tiger or eagle leaping on the back of
p. fit.
46