[Review] 张昌平《吉金类系:海外及港台地区收藏的中国青铜器研究》(Zhang Changping: Auspicious Metals’ Categories and System: A Study of Chinese Bronze Vessels Collected Overseas and in the Hong-Kong and Taiwan Region)

Zhang Changping 张昌平, Ji jin xi lei: Haiwai ji Gang Tai diqu shoucang de Zhongguo qingtong qi yanjiu 《吉金类系:海外及港台地区收藏的中国青铜器研究》(Auspicious Metals’ Categories and System: A Study of Chinese Bronze Vessels Collected Overseas and in the Hong-Kong and Taiwan Region). Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe 科学出版社, 2020. ISBN: 978-7-030-67212-4, 305 pages, 128 RMB.

Reviewed by Maria Khayutina (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Complex polities, often called “early states,” began forming on the territory of the present-day People’s Republic of China during the third Millennium BCE. The introduction of bronze-casting technology during the early second Millennium BCE gave a significant impetus to the rise of new political elites, who now could equip their troops with more lethal and awe-inspiring weapons and – even more conspicuously – allowed those elites to display their power and prestige using metal ritual paraphernalia. Indeed, Neolithic elites already employed elaborated sets of ceramic vessels for sacrificial offerings to their ancestors and feasting with their allies and retinues. Magnificently shimmering metal vessels and, somewhat later, musical bells made by skilled craftsmen enabled the kings of the Shang (ca. 1600–1046/45 BCE) and Zhou (1046/45–256 BCE) dynasties to host impressive sacrificial feasts. Leaders of smaller polities and aristocratic families followed their example and similarly commissioned vessels and bells.

In inscriptions cast on the surface of the objects, they often called bronze “auspicious metal” (ji jin 吉金) – the term that we see in the title of this book. Bronze was long regarded as the most precious material, valued even more than gold. Rulers and other nobles not only used bronzes during their lives but received them as burial goods. Due to this funerary custom, many Shang and Zhou periods’ bronzes survived the turbulences of their own and later epochs and came to light anew as the result of accidental discoveries or planned excavations. From the 12th century onwards, Chinese literati and political elites, including emperors and their highest officials, collected ancient bronzes. They valued bronzes as proxies to the highly venerated antiquity, both for inscriptions that that bronzes often bear, and for the bronzes’ aesthetic qualities. Conversely, Western collectors interested more in art than other issues, began collecting Chinese bronzes during the 19th century. In the 20th century, many objects from old Chinese collections and new lootings made their way to Western Europe, Northern America, and Japan. Professor Zhang’s book contributes to the efforts of Chinese scholars who keep track of and make use of their national heritage dispersed abroad.[1]

Zhang Changping is an internationally acknowledged specialist in Bronze Age archaeology, bronze and bronze-casting technology. Since 2009, he has held the chair of archaeology at the Institute of History of Wuhan University. Before that, he worked for over twenty years in the Archaeology and Cultural Relics Institute of Hubei Province, acting as its director beginning in 2001 and combining this responsibility with his position as a vice-director of the Hubei Provincial Museum. Since 2013, he has been the director of excavations at Panlongcheng 盘龙城, located in the Wuhan suburbs, which is the most significant Bronze Age walled city-site in the Yangzi valley. His present book includes twenty-four individual papers and final remarks on various issues related to ancient Chinese bronzes collected outside mainland China. The papers, numbering between five and fifty pages, originally appeared in academic journals or published collections between 2011 and 2019. Pulling them together like this makes sense, as they revolve around a common topic and thus can be more easily found by interested readers. On the other hand, the rather heterogeneous structure of this compilation complicates the reviewer’s task.

The first essay, “Overseas and Hongkong-Taiwan Regions’ Collections and Studies of Chinese Bronze Objects” (p. 1–49), begins with a brief introduction to foreigners’ collecting history from 1848 to the present. It introduces the essential past catalogues and investigations of foreign collections by Chinese paleographers, art historians, and archaeologists, especially Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940), Rong Geng 容庚 (1894–1983), and Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911–1966), and recent large scale cataloguing projects organized by the National Museum of China in cooperation with museums in Japan, the UK, and the USA. Next, the author introduces the works of leading international bronze specialists from the 1920–1960s, beginning with Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978) and Max Loehr (1903–1988), as well as the lesser-known Rutherford John Gettens (1900–1974), a conservation specialist interested in aspects of bronze-casting. The reader then finds the list of major foreign journals where bronze-related studies sporadically appear, i.e., Artibus Asiae, Early China, Antiquity, Archives of Asian Art, Orientations, and Arts of Asia, and then again, a list of the most prominent scholars working on Chinese bronzes since the 1980s – Hayashi Minao, Kwang-chih Chang, Robert W. Bagley, Lothar von Falkenhausen and Jessica Rawson. Consisting of only seven pages, these introductions to various aspects of collecting and scholarship are somewhat sketchy, with regrettable omissions of some titles, especially the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, although this journal is quoted elsewhere in the book. The valuable part of this essay is as a guide to the most significant collections of Chinese bronzes worldwide. It is subdivided into four sections: Europe, North America, Japan, and Hongkong-Taiwan-Region, and provides information about the museums’ collecting foci, usually including much more than just bronzes, listing items of greatest significance, and the relevant catalogues. The author often adds details, including the origins of collections, the identity of collectors, and museum architecture. This guide is a helpful pocket vade mecum for every Chinese-reading enthusiast of bronze art. Western connoisseurs would equally benefit should an English-language version be made available.

The following essay, “Foreign scholars’ investigations of Early Shang bronze vessels” (海外学者对早期商时期青铜器的研究), gives an overview of foreign studies of Early Shang (ca. 16–15th c. BCE) bronze vessels. This focus is understandable in connection to Zhang’s fieldwork at the Panlongcheng site, which dates from the Early to Middle (14th c.) Shang periods. He begins with the works of Karlgren and Loehr, who studied Shang vessels in museums’ collections from the 1930s to early 1950s, before any Early Shang archaeological sites were yet discovered, and thus not realizing how early these objects dated. Karlgren proposed a periodization based on decorative patterns, while Loehr combined typological analysis with technological observations. His study was informed by J. Leroy Davidson’s (1908–1980) insight that the fine reliefs must have been produced by carving the patterns directly into the casting mold. As this was a comparably simple technique, this feature points to the early date of those vessels featuring such patterns. As at this time, the Late Shang (ca. 13–11th c. BCE) royal capital in present-day Anyang 安陽 was the only known Shang archaeological site, Loehr attributed the fine thread relief designs to a phase I and thicker reliefs to phase II of what he called “Anyang period.” Only after the discovery of the Early Shang city in Zhengzhou in 1955, followed by the excavations of its suburb Erligang 二里崗, did it become clear that Loehr’s early “Anyang” phases correspond to the Early Shang, or “Erligang period.” Consequently, museums that held such bronzes, especially the Royal Ontario Museum and San Francisco’s Asian art Museum, re-dated them as Early Shang.

In the next section of this paper, the author introduces the main international works on Early Shang bronzes based on archaeologically excavated materials that have become increasingly accessible, especially since the 1980s, paying particular attention to Robert Bagley’s work on Panlongcheng, as well as to the international symposium on the Art and Archaeology of the Erligang Civilization organized by Bagley in 2008, in which Zhang also participated.

The following paper, “Foreign scholars’ investigations of Chinese bronze vessels casting technique” (海外学者对中国古代青铜器铸造技术的研究) again oversees the history of foreign collecting from the late 19th century onwards and focuses on the debate about the Chinese casting technology. Zhang notes that although the Swedish collector and engineer Orvar Karlbeck (1879–1967) inspected pottery casting molds from Anyang during the 1930s, he did not dare to reject the then dominant opinion by W. Perceval Yetts (1858–1957) that the vessels were cast using the lost wax technique. Only Noel Barnard (1922–2016), who reexamined the molds in 1961, convinced the Western scholarly community and collectors that Chinese bronze vessels were made by direct casting in multi-sectional ceramic piece-molds (p. 64–66). In the second part of this paper, the author turns to specific issues such as the technique of decorating the bronzes’ surfaces: whether the ornamental motives were cut on the model (mo 模) and pressed into the mold (fan 范) or similar to the earliest phases, were still incised directly into the mold. Pointing to the related debate between Robert Bagley and Lukas Nickel, which unfolded on the pages of the Artibus Asiae in 2006–2009, the author expresses skepticism that this conundrum can be definitively resolved, quoting Bruce Trigger’s statement that “because of the abundance of historical data, evidence can be selectively marshaled to ‘prove’ almost anything” (p. 73).[2]

Zhang further makes noteworthy observations regarding systemic weaknesses of foreign scholarship on bronze-casting technology. He notes that, although some museums have their own laboratories, they are busy with testing objects from all over the world and pay only limited attention to Chinese pieces. The scholarship on Chinese bronzes mostly takes place in universities, but most scholars have either art historical or anthropological rather than natural-scientific backgrounds (p. 74). Although foreign scholars have also investigated technological aspects of bronzes in foreign museums’ collections, most objects are unprovenanced. Working with such objects sometimes leads to errors. For example, the author points to the case when Gettens, who revealed technological differences between the three jue-beakers in the Freer Collection of Chinese Bronzes, supposed that they derive from different regions and epochs. As Zhang notes, Gettens did not realize that during the late phase of the Late Shang period, the workshops in Anyang used different methods to cast either vessels for actual use on the one hand or the so-called “luminous objects” (ming qi 明器) for the use as grave goods on the other hand (p. 75).

Further, Zhang criticizes Chinese and foreign specialists who often fail to follow each other’s work closely. Even now, Zhang laments, the understanding of the Chinese bronze-casting technology in the West is limited. As an embarrassing example, he points to a recent book on the history of technology published by the Oxford University Press with a detailed description of how the ancient Chinese made bronzes allegedly using the lost-wax method, thus showing the author’s lack of awareness even of the relevant literature published in western-languages.[3]

The other twenty essays are dedicated to bronze objects from various foreign collections. They differ in format and can be typologized as follows:

  1. An overview of one specific museum collection, namely, the Meiyingtang 玫茵堂collection in the Rietberg Museum in Zurich (p. 77–84).
  2. Typological studies of certain objects categories featuring objects from foreign and domestic collections, including the Late Shang “gu-shaped zun” (gu xing zun 觚形尊) for alcoholic beverages (p. 85–94), various Shang and Zhou vessels with tinkling bells hidden inside their socles (p. 95–121), large ding 鼎 cauldrons with zoomorphic patterns (p. 157–179), and various vessels with the “spirit-mask pattern” (shen mian wen 神面紋, p. 246–256).[4]
  3. Studies of individual objects or objects’ groups, such as two unique and yet very similar tiger-shaped vessels from the collections in France and Japan (p. 204–214, see below for more details), the Min’s square container for beverages (Min fanglei 皿方罍), bought back by the Hunan Provincial Museum at Christie’s in 2014 (p. 215–225); a group of three vessels for alcoholic beverages and a spearhead dated to the Shang-Zhou transition, all featuring the same emblem from several private collections in Hong Kong (p. 180–190),[5] and a group of Warring States period’s (ca. 4–3 c. BCE) vessels made in the Chu kingdom, excavated during the 1930s and purchased by Orvar Karlbeck who donated them to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities later (p. 288–297).
  4. Works on objects from most recent excavations in China that can be contextualized or dated through comparisons with objects from foreign collections. This group includes several papers on bronzes excavated from various cemeteries of the Zeng 曾 polity centered in Suizhou 隨州, Hubei province. Naturally, for a Hubei-based bronze expert, Zeng polity’s bronzes, which keep being excavated in large numbers during the past several decades, have been one of Zhang’s research foci since long ago.[6] One study reviews early bo 鎛 bells that may be drawn as comparisons for the bell excavated from the largest Western Zhou tomb in the Yejiashan 葉家山 cemetery in 2013 (p. 191–203), another paper focuses on a cauldron of Lady Middle-Born Mi Jia of Sui (Sui Zhong Mi Jia ding 隨中彌加鼎) from another Zeng cemetery dated to the Spring and Autumn period (p. 279–287), and yet another one analyses the group of bronzes commissioned by the Spring and Autumn period’s ruler of Zeng, Bo Ke 曾伯克 (264–272). The latter group was looted from a tomb and announced for sale with falsified provenance in Japan in 2019 but was successfully returned to the Chinese state after archaeologists rang the alarm bell with the Cultural Heritage Administration.
    Other papers deal with objects associated with early Chinese polities excavated in various places and dating from different periods. One study deals with the early Western Zhou (ca. 2nd half of the 11th c. BCE) Yi zun 義尊and Yi he 義盉, confiscated by the police from tomb raiders in the south-west of Shanxi province. Both vessels bear inscriptions mentioning the conquest of Shang – one of the key anchors of Chinese cultural memory, comparable to the Trojan War in the Mediterranean world (with the difference that the conquest was truly historical). Therefore, inscribed vessels have a high historical value (p. 226–234). Another study analyzes the you 卣 vessels for liquors with a long loop handle dated to the period of the Shang-Zhou transition that may be used as a comparison to the vessels of the same type excavated in 2013 in lavishly furnished tombs in Shigushan 石鼓山 near Baoji 寶鷄 in Shaanxi province (p. 235–245). Finally, one article focuses on the bronze bell of Duke Jia of Chu 楚公家, excavated in Wanfunao 萬福垴, Jijiang 枝江, Hubei province, and compares it with the bells commissioned by the same person in the collection of the Sen’oku 泉屋 Museum in Kyoto (p. 257–263).
  5. Overviews of the groups of bronzes or individual objects sold at auctions, especially Sotheby’s. They include the private collection of Julius Eberhard, sold in 2013 (p. 131–144), a group of vessels from various prominent late Qing collections sold in 2014 (p. 145–156); a group of Shang and Zhou vessels sold in 2012 (p. 122–130); the Spring and Autumn period’s flask of the Duke of Chen (Chen hou hu 陳侯壺), sold in 2012 (p. 273–278).

Most articles address specialists interested in the questions of provenance, dating, and casting technology. In the following, I will, however, highlight one of the essays which, I believe, may appeal to a broader readership.

The article “The Tiger you” (Hu you 虎卣) features one of the most well-known and fascinating pieces of ancient Chinese art– known as La Tigresse – in the collection of the Musée Cernuschi in Paris as well as with its less known “sister” in the collection of the Sen’oku Museum in Kyoto. Both objects represent vessels with lids and handles, known as you, with bodies shaped as a tiger standing on the rear paws and using its tail as the third support for equilibrium. Vessels representing owls, rhinoceroses, horses, waterfowl, or hybrid creatures are occasionally found in tombs of Shang and Zhou high elites. These objects are very rare and valuable but together, they form a relatively large group. What makes each of the two Tiger you, dating from the Shang period, unique even in comparison to other zoomorphic vessels is that the tiger is holding a human person (a male) in its forepaws. The facial expressions of both human and tiger are static, and it is unclear what they are doing together. This gives room to any kinds of speculations: is the tiger embracing and protecting the human, or is it going to devour him, or do they copulate? Zhang’s interest is, however, not in the object’s meaning but in the way two tigers from France and Japan, whose provenance is equally unknown, relate to each other.

The Cernuschi Museum acquired the Tiger, which initially belonged to the German antiquities dealer Edgar Worch (1880–1972), at a public sale in 1920 (p. 205). Baron Sumitomo Tomoito 住友友純 (1865–1926), the Japanese industrial magnate whose collection constitutes the basis of the Sen’oku Museum, bought the sister Tiger in 1903 (p. 206).

On p. 207–214, Zhang meticulously compares both vessels feature by feature. We learn that the Sen’oku’s tiger (h=35,7 cm) is only slightly taller than the Cernuschi’s one (h=35 cm). Close examinations reveal other tiny differences in the appearance of the tigers’ teeth, claws, or the ornamental patterns covering its body (p. 209). Nevertheless, Zhang argues that the two vessels were made in one workshop at one time and possibly, even represent a set in which they could have been used together (p. 210). This argument is convincing since making fully identical objects using piece-mold casting was impossible because the model and the mold could be used only once. Hence, vessels forming sets always manifest tiny differences, and yet the artisans’ intention to make them similarly looking is obvious, while different sets cast in the same workshop are usually individualized by the intentional recombination of standard decorative elements.

Zhang proceeds with suggestions about the possible origin of the Tiger you in present-day Ningxiang 寧鄉縣 county of Hunan province (p. 210). Located 40 km west of the provincial capital Changsha 長沙 and ca. 150 km south of the Yangzi River, this area is where splendid bronzes, including zoomorphic vessels, have often been found in pits near riverbeds and mountains, probably deposited there as offerings for natural spirits. It is likely that during the Late Shang period, Ningxiang was one of several autonomous regional centers of bronze craftsmanship. This area was far beyond the scope of the political control of the Shang dynasty, whose capital in present-day Anyang was 1000 km to the north. However, similar bronze-casting technology and the shared vocabulary of plastic forms and ornamental patterns reveal that both areas intensively interacted during the late 2nd Millennium BCE. The agency of the south in the formation of early Chinese civilization is gradually being recognized in Chinese academia and public opinion, which have been long dominated by the monocentric perspective on the Yellow River valley as the “Cradle of the East.” Identifying the southern factors in early Chinese bronze art is one of Zhang’s many significant contributions.[7]

At the end of the book, we find a short article in which Zhang shares his thoughts about the interrelations and differences between the Bronze Age cultures in the West and in China. He notes that although it is true that the earliest bronze objects on the present-day Chinese territory were found in the northwest and that they usually have parallels further north in the Eurasian Steppe, there are still many missing links in the chain that possibly connects the early bronze-casting centers in the Central Plains, starting from Erlitou 二里頭 (ca. 1800–1650 BCE), and Western bronze cultures. Hence, he states, many Chinese scholars are cautious regarding the question of the origin of the Chinese bronze-casting technology, even if most Western scholars express no doubt that this technology reached China by transfer as such a complex invention was unlikely to have occurred independently in multiple places (p. 299). Then the author discusses the concept of the “Bronze Age” coined by the Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen (1788–1865), who used it along with the “Stone Age” and “Iron Age” to classify technological stages in northern Europe. Looking at Mesopotamia or Egypt, where bronze was used on a relatively small scale, the author mentions that some scholars even doubt whether the use of the “Bronze Age” concept makes sense with regard to the Middle East (p. 299). In China, there is indeed no doubt that bronze played an immense role in the societies of the so-called “Three Dynasties” (Xia, often associated with Erlitou, Shang, and Zhou). The author supposes that cooking methods – boiling, braising, or steaming – predefined the importance of vessels in early China and facilitated the invention of many specific types of vessels, first made of clay and later metal. He assumes that in the West, the food was roasted and, therefore, not so many vessel types were needed (p. 299–300). This observation seems premature, as Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman vessels not only display a great variety of shapes, but this variety is equally reflected in the appropriate terminology. The difference is that in the West, the vessels were mostly made of clay or glass, although Greek sacrificial bronze cauldrons or massive Etruscan bronze wine jars can be seen as counterparts to the Chinese bronze vessels. Besides, a greater variability of shapes, both in China and in the West, can be found among the vessels for alcoholic beverages rather than for food. Zhang further states that the main technological difference between Chinese and Western bronze cultures was in the use of the ceramic piece-molds in China on the one hand and of forging and lost-wax casting in the West on the other hand (p. 300–301). He underlines that the use of direct casting facilitated the creation of delicate ornamental patterns or inscriptions on the bronzes’ surfaces, whereas comparable features could be added to forged objects or lost-wax castings only by engraving. Therefore, they are seldom seen on Egyptian or Mesopotamian bronzes (p. 301).

In a short postface, Zhang shares some memories of his visits to various museums and expresses gratitude to curators and researchers in various countries. It is interesting to learn that his first visit to the Freer and Sackler’s collections in Washington in 2000 predestinated his commitment to studying early Chinese bronzes, which remains his research focus today. All in all, I hope this book convinces Chinese colleagues that foreign collections and foreigners’ scholarship of Chinese material culture are worthy of consideration and that international cooperation can enrich national scholarship. It is quite possible that the book may also appeal to a broader Sinophone readership interested in early Chinese art and archaeology, encouraging them to visit Chinese collections in other countries. The book will also be very useful to curators in international museums, helping to contextualize better and to estimate the historical value of their funds. For specialists in Chinese bronzes, this book will certainly serve as a valuable reference work.

Finally, some shortcomings of this publication should also be noted. The book would have benefited from a more straightforward structure. As it often occurs in papers’ collections, partial reduplications of contents in various articles are hardly avoidable. One could also wish that some photographs were printed in color and larger size, but in general, the quality of images is sufficient to see relevant details.


[1] For one of the first related publications, see Rong Geng 容庚, Hai wai ji jin tulu 海外吉金圖錄 [The Illustrated Catalogue of Auspicious Metals beyond the Seas] (Beiping: Yanjing daxue kaogu xueshe 燕京大學考古學社, 1935).

[2] Cf. Trigger, Bruce C., A History of Archaeological Thought. 2 ed. (Cambridge: University Press, 2007), p. 4.

[3] Cf. Headrick, Daniel R., Technology: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 31. I find the choice of the latter book as a target of criticism somewhat catty, as its author is a science-pop writer aiming to provide a global perspective to general public rather than an academic historian, and yet it is true that the academic publisher should have include a China specialist as a peer-reviewer.

[4] In ancient China, a great variety of vessels with specific functions were created. The number of specific terms used to distinguish between different types exceeds the number of English words suitable for translation. Therefore, Western art historians, museum curators and archaeologists have no other method but to use Chinese transliterations to classify these objects.

[5] “Emblems” (hui 徽) are inscriptions consisting of one or a few more or less pictographic characters. They are usually understood as proper nouns or nouns combinations identifying kinship groups, although some elements or the complete emblems may also identify occupations of their commissioners, e.g., in the military. The examination of emblems together with other features may in some cases suggest that objects in different collections belong together or can even be traced to a certain region.

[6] See Zhang Changping, Zeng guo qingtongqi yanjiu 曾國青銅器研究 (Beijing: Wenwu, 2009).

[7] For Zhang’s other studies of southern bronzes cf. Zhang Changping, Shang Zhou shiqi nanfang qingtongqi yanjiu 商周时期南方青铜器研究 (Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan 商务印书馆, 2016).


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
khayutina (8 octobre 2022). [Review] 张昌平《吉金类系:海外及港台地区收藏的中国青铜器研究》(Zhang Changping: Auspicious Metals’ Categories and System: A Study of Chinese Bronze Vessels Collected Overseas and in the Hong-Kong and Taiwan Region). L'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient en Chine - The French School of Asian Studies in China - 法國遠東學院在中國. Consulté le 21 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/oha2


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