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-POTTERY and PORCELAIN-
 

Section 1
Early Neolithic Pottery

Contents


Introduction

The pan-p'o potters made both a coarse gray or red pottery and a fine red ware burnished and then painted in black with geometric designs and occasionally with fishes and human faces.

They seem not to have known the potter's wheel, but made their vessels by coiling long strips of clay. From clay they also made spindle whorls even hairpins, but the finer objects such as needles, fishhooks, spoons, and arrowheads were made of bone. Part of the villages of Pan-p'o and Ta-ho-ts'un have been roofed over and preserved as museums of Chinese Neolithic culture.

 

The painted pottery found first by Andersson, and later in many other sites in Honan and Kansu, has not been matched in quality and beauty by any Neolithic wares discovered since. It consists chiefly of mortuary urns, wide and deep bowls, and tall vases, often with loop-handles set low on the body. Though the walls are thin, the forms are robust, their generous contours beautifully danced by the decoration in black pigment which was dearly executed with a crude form of brush. Some of the designs are geometric, consisting of parallel bands or lozenges containing concentric squares, crosses, or diamonds. The lower half of the body is always left undecorated; it may have been set in the sandy ground to prevent it from overturning. Many vessels are adorned with sweeping wavelike bands that gather into a kind of whirlpool; others make use of the stylized figures of men, frogs, fishes, and birds. Shards found at Ma-chia-yao in Kansu (c2500 BCE) reveal a quite sophisticated brush technique, in one case depicting plants each of whose leaves ends in a sharp point with a flick of the brush-the same technique that was to be used by the Sung artist, three thousand years later, in painting bamboo. Naturalistic motifs, however, are rare, and the majority are decorated with geometric or stylized patterns whose significance is still a mystery.

Until recently it was thought that the painted pottery Yangshao culture was more or less directly superseded by a totally different culture centered on Shantung, and represented by the burnished black pottery of Lung-shan. But under the impact of a succession of new discoveries, this rather simple picture has given way to a more complex and interesting one. First of all, the beautiful painted pottery from Ma-chia-yao and Pan-shan in Kansu (c 2400 BCE) is now known from carbon-14 analysis to be as much as two thousand years later in date than the painted pottery of the Yang-shao village of Pan-p'o, which has yielded a date as early as 4865 BCE +/- 110 years. This seems to suggest a centrifugal movement of the nuclear Yang-shao outward from the Central Plain (Chung- yüan) and to disprove the old theory that the Chinese painted pottery was the product of a great eastward movement, if not of peoples, then of an essentially Western Asiatic culture. That there may have been some cross fertilization with Western Asia is possible, particularly in the later Neolithic period, but in their lively, uplifted forms and, still more, in the dynamic linear movement of their brush decoration the Chinese painted vases reveal qualities that are uniquely Chinese.

Bowl. Decorated with scrolled ornament in red and white slip. Excavated at P'ei- hsien, Kiangsu. Ch'ing-lien-kang culture, late Neolithic period.

Every year as new sites in eastern and southeastern China are discovered, the native origins of Chinese Neolithic culture are more firmly established. In 1973-74. for instance, at Ho-mu-tuin northern Kiangsu, remains of a village of about 5000 BCE, at least as early as Pan-p'o, were unearthed. The houses were built on timber posts over marshy land; the inhabitants cultivated rice, had pottery, knew the elephant and rhinoceros.' Another related phase in the eastern China Neolithic is seen at Ch'ing-lien-kang in northern Chekiang, which produced the elegant bowl at left, decorated with swirling patterns in red, white and black. As we move further northward up the coast, and later in time, we come to Ta-wen-You in southern Shantung. The pottery jar from Ning-yang-hsien illustrated here is a product of the Ta-wen-You culture, which, beginning perhaps as early as 4000 BCE, spread outward, even to influence the painted pottery tradition of Yang-shao. Many Chinese scholars think that the marks scratched on the Ta-wen-k'ou pottery, dateable around 2500- 2000 BCE, represent the first true writing in China and are the ancestors of the bronze and oracle-bone script of the Shang Dynasty described in the next chapter.

 

By about 2400 BCE, the Ta-wen-k'ou culture was shading imperceptibly into the "Black Pottery culture" first found by Dr. Wu Chin-ting in 1928 in Lung-shan in Shantung. Most famous among the Lung-shan wares is a delicate pottery made of dark gray clay burnished black and of incredible fragility, being sometimes as little as half a millimeter thick. The shapes are elegant, while the decoration, consisting chiefly of raised bands, grooves, and milled rings, gives it a somewhat metallic, machine-made look. It must have been extremely difficult to make, let alone use, for in the succeeding Bronze Age the tradition died out completely. Recent discoveries at Wei-fang in Shantung reveal that the Black Pottery culture also produced a white pottery of remarkable vigor and originality, illustrated in Fig. 8 by the extraordinary pitcher, called a k'uei, which seems to imitate a vessel made of hides bound with thongs. While the painted and black wares are certainly the most spectacular, they represent only a small fraction of all the utensils produced by the Chinese Neolithic potter. There was much plain red ware and even more coarse gray ware representing an all ceramic tradition in China. To the art lover, these gray wares are often of interest more for their legacy than for any intrinsic merit they may possess, for later we will find some of these shapes, notably the ting and li tripods and the hsien steamer (a pot with perforated base standing on a li) , adopted in the Bronze Age as ritual vessels used in the ancestral sacrifices of the Shang Dynasty; while the technique of impressing designs in the wet clay, which later developed, particularly in eastern China, into a sophisticated language of stamped motifs, also played its part in the decoration of the bronzes.

As we move westward again from Shantung into Honan, we find black Lung-shan pottery in strata overlying the earlier Yangshao and representing a still later stage in the development of the Neolithic culture of the Central Plain. In some of the latest Black Pottery sites, such as Ch'i-chia-p'ing in Kansu, dated by carbon- to around 2000-1700 BCE simple artifacts of pure copper begin plod. to appear, heralding the dawn of the great Bronze Age culture that will be described in Chapter 2.

 

Though often beautifully made and finished, most of the stone implements of late Neolithic times were utilitarian objects such as hoes, scrapers, and axes, one of the latter being the ancestor of the ko-type dagger axe of the Shang Dynasty (p. 27). The finest of these implements were made of polished jade, a stone which because of its hardness, fine texture, and purity of color was destined to become an object of special veneration in Chinese cultural history. Among Neolithic jades are bracelets (huan), pen annular rings (chueh), and half-rings (huang), a flat disc with a hole in the center (pi) and a ring or short tube squared on the outside (fsung). In later historic times these shapes acquired a ritual or ceremonial function, the pi and tsung, for example, symbolizing respectively heaven and earth; but there is no means at present of knowing whether they already had this, or indeed any, symbolic meaning in the late Stone Age.

 

It is natural that in a history of art we should chronicle the early stages of civilization in that most indestructible of crafts-pottery. Just who the people were who made it is not yet certain. There were many tribes in prehistoric China, some communicating with each other, others not, some advanced, others backward. Hundreds of Neolithic sites have been excavated all over China, and although many problems remain unsolved, a picture is beginning to form of how Chinese society was emerging, and of how local customs and craft traditions were beginning to develop.

For all the regional differences, it seems that by the end of the Neolithic period, which should be put in the most advanced areas at about 2000 BCE, the Chinese were leading an organized social life, centered on the farm and the village and bound together by ritual; that they practiced high standards of craftsmanship, were preoccupied with death, made ritual use of jade, and had mastered the flexible brush as an instrument of artistic expression. This primitive culture lingered on in southern and western China long after the coming of bronze had opened up a new and incomparably richer chapter in Chinese history.


Sources

 

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Copyright DateRichard R. Wertz