Page 70 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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65 Sketch of reconstructed tomb,
showing lining of pit, tomb clumber,
and triple coffin. Ma-wang-tui,
Changsha, Hunan. Western Han
Dynasty.

glass (excavations have yielded glass beads as early as Western
Chou), bronze weapons and vessels, pottery and lacquer ware.
The filter of white clay and charcoal has even preserved fragments
of silk and linen, documents written with a brush on slips of bam-
boo, beautifully painted shields of lacquered leather, and musical
instruments.
Here for the first time we find large numbers of wooden figu-
rines of attendants and slaves. Confucius is said to have con-
demned this practice as he thought it would lead people on, or
back, to burying the living with the dead. He thought straw fig-
ures were safer. In the succeeding Han Dynasty, pottery cast in
moulds was found to be both cheaper and more enduring than
wood, and perhaps more acceptable to Confucians. The Chang-
sha figures, carved and painted, give useful information about late
Chou costume. More spectacular are the cult objects, consisting
of grotesque monster heads, sometimes sprouting antlers and a
long tongue, and the drum or gong stands formed of birds stand-
ing back-to-back on tigers or entwined serpents, decorated in yel-
low, red, and black lacquer. The gong stand illustrated on page 5 1
found in 1 957 in a tomb in the Ch'u city of Hsin-yang in Honan,
66 Painted figurines from tombs at
Changsha, Hunan. Wood. Late Warring reflects its contacts with the south: similar stands are engraved on
States or early Han period. After a number of bronze vessels from Ch'u sites, while bronze drums
Kwang-chih Chang.
found in the Dong-s'on region of northern Vietnam also bear
snake and bird designs believed to be connected with rain magic.
PICTORIAL ARTS Miraculously preserved in the Ch'u graves were the two oldest
paintings on silk yet discovered in China, one of which is illus-
trated here. Swiftly sketched with deft strokes of the brush, it
shows a woman in full-skirted dress tied with a sash at the waist,
standing in profile attended by a phoenix and by a dragon whose
so