JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae. All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DORIS DOHRENWEND THE EARLY CHINESE MIRROR T hree small bronze disks unearthed from Chinese soil and published within the past decade suggest that the round metal mirror was known and used in China as early as the Western Chou and even the Shang period. One such find is a small disk from the Shang site at Houchia-chuang. It has a long central loop, a convex reflecting surface, and the back is decorated with a design of striated quadrants bordered by a band of scallops'. A second early specimen antedates 770 B. C. as it was found in a Chinese tomb of Western Chou date excavated in the region of the great dam site at San Men Hsia on the Yellow River2. It is round, rimless and perfectly flat, with a double loop; the decoration consists of two very primitive profile tigers flanking a wild horse or ass above the loop, and a bird below. The design, rendered in a thread-like relief line, brings to mind two mirrors of comparable style (one with dancing figures in the Yale University Museum3, the other with a coiled quadruped design in Kyoto4), and suggests a relation to Ordos rather than to Chinese art. The third piece, in the collection of Kyoto Uni-versity5, is perhaps the most significant. Its loop is analogous to the loop of the Shang mirror; its face is slightly concave; and it has a Middle Chou decor of interlacing, grooved, flat dragon bands. These examples are still isolated and thus problematical. Only one of them, the "Middle * I would like to express my gratitude at the outset to Professor Max Loehr of Harvard University and Professor Alexander Soper of Bryn Mawr and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts for their criticism and encouragement. Without it this paper would surely remain, as do so many old seminar papers, unreadable and unread. I See Kao Ch'u-hsiin, Yin-tai ti i-mien t'ung-ching chi ch'i hsiang-kuan chih wen-t'i (Problems of the Bronze Mirror Discovered from a Shang burial), Academia Sinica, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, XXIX (Taipei, 195 8), Plate 2 and pp. 685-721. This button or lid-like bronze object was found in I934, loop down, at the western side of Hsi-peikang I005, a grave believed to date from the later Shang period which contained the remains of six individuals and was one of a group of thirty-seven other small graves. Polished metal is still visible on the face of the disk, which elsewhere shows traces of red pigment and of woven material. While he mentions the divergent opinion of scholars on the Chinese mainland and the(initial) doubts of the Japanese scholar Sueji Um...
The Art and Archaeological Delegation which visited the People's Republic of China in November of 1973 was jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Scientific and Technical Association of the PRC. Originally intended to be chiefly archaeological, the delegation ultimately included specialists in Chinese painting, a historian and a conservationist as well as those of us more immediately concerned with “underground art” or recent archaeological finds (see List 1).
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