Page 94 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

seem to be of enormous size, while a set of smaller drums stands
on a platform under a wagon roof of a type still to be found in
Southeast Asia and Sumatra today.
From Chinese sources we know that these are the tombs of the
rulers of a non-Chinese tribe, or group of tribes, which they
called Tien and which flourished in remote independence well
into the Han Dynasty. The realistic modelling on the tops of the
Shih-chai-shan "drums" has a counterpart in the Chinese tomb
figurines of the Han Dynasty; but in its technique and decoration,
Shih-chai-shan bronze art seems to be more closely related to the
simple bronze crafts of China's western minorities and to the
more sophisticated culture of northern Vietnam known as D6ng-
s'on.
In Han tombs there have been found great quantities of bronze
objects, including harnesses and carriage fittings, swords and
knives, utensils and belt buckles, many of which are inlaid with
gold or silver, turquoise or jade. Even the trigger mechanism of a
crossbow was often so cunningly inlaid as to make it an object of
beauty. Some of these show the powerful impact of the animal
style of the Ordos region, which in turn was influenced by that cu-
rious mixture of stylisation and realism characteristic of the art of
the northern steppes.
98 Carnage fittings. Bronze inlaid with
silver. Han Dynasty.

BRONZE MIRRORS The bronze mirrors of the Han Dynasty continue the traditions
developed at Loyang and Shou-chou during the Warring States.
The Shou-chou coiled dragon design becomes more complex and
crowded, the dragon's body being drawn in double or triple lines,
while the background is generally crosshatched. Another group,
also chiefly from Shou-chou, has an overall design of spirals on
which a scalloped, many-pointed device is sometimes superim-
posed; its significance may be astronomical. Most interesting and
most pregnant with symbolic meaning are the so-called TLV mir-
rors, of which the finest were produced in the Loyang region from
the Wang Mang interregnum (a.d. 9-25) to about a.d. 100, al-
though the design was already being used on mirror backs in the
second century B.C.
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