well over four thousand years. Both the people and the culture descend directly from a civilization which took form during the third millennium before Christ. Many characteristics of prehistoric Chinese art persist or recur throughout these centuries in a continuity found in no other great civilization of today.
Like the legends of all cultures, those of China describe the origin of the world. In one common version, P'an Ku created the world by separating heaven and earth. During the next 400,000 years, the Twelve Emperors of Heaven and the Eleven Emperors of Earth reigned over the world. The Nine Emperors of Mankind reigned during the next 45,000 years. Then a sequence of sixteen ralers was followed by the three Great Sovereigns: Fu Hsi, Shên Nung, and Huang Ti. These last are credited with inventing the arts and crafts and founding Chinese civilization. Shên Nung taught the people to till the soil. Huang Ti, known as the Yellow Emperor, founded the imperial house of China.
The first two are usually represented with human heads and serpent bodies, suggesting a totemic concept, but Huang Ti, the Supreme Anees-tor, is depicted as entirely human. According to legend, he and his five successors civilized the Chinese people by teaching religious concepts and rules of moral conduct. With the fifth successor, legend crosses the threshold into history, for he, Emperor Yü, founded the first historical house, the Hsia dynasty. Thus legend melds with history in the person of the fifth lineal descendant of the legendary Yellow Emperor.
Modern studies indicate that there is more truth in these myths than was formerly believed. Archaeologists have found remains of a prehistoric man which date as far back as 500,000 B.C. This creature, known as Peking man, is one of the most ancient specimens of humanity yet discovered, establishing beyond doubt that eastern Asia was actually inhabited during the same ancient period spanned in Chinese legend. The brain capacity of this early man was not quite equal to that of modern man but was double that of the gorilla and the chimpanzee. His human status is bolstered by evidence that he shaped tools and used fire. However, it is not at all certain that Peking man was the actual ancestor of the modern Chinese.
The Ice Age interfered seriously with both the growth of human settlement and the preservation of archaeological evidence; consequently, very little has been discovered about the intervening millennia of Chinese prehistory before about 20,000 B.C. Habitation by hunting and gathering cultures after this date is evident from traces found in China, Manchuria, and Mongolia. Migrants from these cultures probably crossed the land bridge, now sunken to form the Bering Strait, to people the Americas. More and more, however, the people tended to live in regular settlements. By about 5000 B.C. they appear to have domesticated the pig and begun making coarse pottery. These people were the prehistoric, but direct, ancestors of historical China.
The earliest truly artistic works discovered in China are from a neolithic pottery culture of the third millennium B.C. The Swedish archaeologist J. G. Andersson discovered the first specimens of magnificent painted ceramic vessels from this period, called Yang Shao after the modern place name. The origin and early stages of Yang Shao pottery remain obscure. Definitive answers to puzzling questions await further excavations in Central Asia and adjacent territories linking China with western Asia and the Near East. Certainly, the early pottery culture of China owes much to that of the more ancient Mesopotamian and Iranian cultures. Highly developed by the fifth millennium B.C., these cultures used forms and decorative motifs markedly similar to those found in Yang Shao pieces of two thousand years later.
Chinese scholars, although usually reluctant to admit any Western influence upon ancient China, have acknowledged this evidence and admitted its implications. Some have taken the initiative in pursuing these threads. For instance, Li Chi, director of the Academia Sinica and author of a work on the beginnings of Chinese civilization, sees a somewhat degenerate form of the hero-and-beast motif of ancient Mesopotamia in some Chinese woodcarvings and bronze inscriptions bearing a face mask with two antithetically positioned tigers. Another similarity noted by Li Chi involves jars having phallic-shaped handles standing upright in their centers, found at Jembet Nasr in Mesopotamia, at Mohenjo-Daro in India, and at Yang Shao in China.
Andersson draws interesting comparisons between decorative motifs of Yang Shao vessels and those from Anau in Russian Turkestan and Tripolje in the Black Sea region; however, the striking similarities between designs decorating prehistoric Mesopotamian pottery and those of early China are of more significance. Beatrice Goff, in her book on symbols of prehistoric Mesopotamia, shows many figures—wavy lines, circles, spirals, triangles, dots, crosses, plants, birds, fish, and weeping human faces—each having exact equivalents in the neolithic ceramics of China. In short, little doubt remains but that the prehistoric pottery culture of China is heavily indebted to the far more ancient civilization of Mesopotamia.
The neolithic Yang Shao pottery culture spanned the millennium from about 2500 B.C. to about 1500 B.C., when Stone Age culture was generally replaced by the bronze culture of the Shang period. In outlying provincial regions such as Kansu, Sinkiang, southern Manchuria, and Yehol, however, prehistoric pottery styles persisted as late as 500 b.c.—long after these had been displaced by more advanced art forms in cultural centers such as Honan, Shensi, and Shansi.
In the earliest phase, 2500 B.C. to about 2200 B.C., the pottery was quite simple, resembling that of prehistoric Europe. Primarily a fine red ware with plain, polished surfaces, some pieces are decorated at the mouth rim with geometric designs in a red of deeper hue. Others have incised or cord-marked patterns. Predominant shapes are bowls with both round bases and flat bases, vases with ring-shaped mouths, and an early form of the tripod-shaped vessels so characteristic of Chinese design in later times. In addition to the red ware, shards of a coarser grey ware have been found.
The middle phase of Yang Shao culture, which Andersson dates from 2200 B.C. to 1700 B.C., climaxed this early civilization with some of the masterpieces of the neolithic potter. Remains from this period have been discovered in Honan, Shansi, Shensi, and Kansu provinces. New sites are currently being discovered. Middle Yang Shao pottery appears to have flourished in these centuries throughout northern China and, at a somewhat later period, in the border regions of Yehol, southern Manchuria, and Sinkiang. Pan-po-ts'un, near Sian, was excavated during the period 1953-55 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has proven the most rewarding of the sites scientifically explored. Some excellent examples of this middle Yang Shao pottery have also been found at Pan-shan in the western province of Kansu.
Middle Yang Shao pottery occurs in a greater variety of shapes— bowls, basins, cups, beakers, pots, jars, jugs, and hollow-legged tripods. The forms are simple and strong. Many are painted with designs in black, red, and brown. The decorative painted designs are, in fact, their most outstanding feature, distinguishing them from neolithic ceramics of other cultures throughout the world. A notable example of the middle Yang Shao artisans' skill is the painted vessel formerly in the Chait collection in New York (Plate 1). This jar, believed to have come from a burial site at Pan-shan in Kansu, has a clean, sturdy shape in light-grey ware tinged with red. Striking decorative patterns create a sense of extraordinary vitality. The brushwork is free and vigorous. The pattern lines are nicely related to the contours of the surfaces.
The many motifs appearing on these ancient vessels are surely symbolic in nature. The symbolism probably expressed concepts of fertility magic. Certainly the wavy lines on the Chait vessel represent water, since the ancient Chinese ideograph for water used the same lines. Since rainfall was a matter of life and death, the primitive artist hoped to produce the actual phenomenon through sympathetic magic by representing it in this manner. The lozenge-shaped forms enclosing the water symbols are another symbolic motif, sometimes said to represent the cowry shell and sometimes the female vulva. These were symbols of the related concepts of abundance and fecundity. The cowry shell was used as money in ancient China and is often found in graves, testifying to the wealth of the deceased. The third element of this design is the cross-hatched background pattern. Since the earliest vessels were made of reeds, this pattern probably represents only the woven surface of the prototype. Interestingly enough, a similar pattern occurs on prehistoric Mesopotamian pottery.
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