Narrative arc set in stone

It was the continual, omnidirectional flow of communication among the nation's ancient cultures that helped to form the foundation of Chinese civilization as we know it today, Zhao Xu reports.

'With the help of jade, people who inhabited the vast area of prehistoric China had engaged in spiritual and artistic exchanges, exchanges that would eventually allow them to acquire a common cultural identity without which the notion of China would not have existed," says Teng Shu-ping, a leading scholar of ancient Chinese jade.

She has partly based her conclusion on the study of one particular type of ritual jadeware known as cong, which typically features a cylindrical tube encased in a square prism.

Today, for the general public, the most famous jade cong pieces come from the Liangzhu culture, a regional civilization that existed in the Yangtze River Delta region between 3300 and 2300 BC. The most finely made examples bear, across their surface, patterns of a mythical man donning a feather headdress and seemingly riding a big-eyed, wide-mouthed beast — interpreted separately as both ancestor-god and divine animal.

Well studied, they are long held by many Chinese archaeologists as the ancestors for the jade cong found in other, later cultures, including Qijia (2300-1500 BC), a late Neolithic to early Bronze Age culture centered around the upper Yellow River region in today's Gansu province in northwestern China.
One of them is Fang Xiangming, head of the Zhejiang provincial institute of cultural relics and archaeology, who had once spent more than six months recording many Liangzhu jade items through hand-drawing. "Never underestimate the ability of our ancestors to pass on materials and ideas across distances and generations," he says. "Such exchanges may have been enabled by a trans-regional network maintained by the elite members of the various cultural groups."

Teng both agrees and disagrees with Fang. "The exchanges had always been taking place, to an extent that often challenges our imagination. However, we shouldn't assume that the jade cong had originated in Liangzhu in eastern China. For one, jade cong pieces have also been discovered in Miaodigou culture, which existed between 3500 and 2900 BC in Shaanxi province, northwestern China."

"In fact, I am tempted to think the contrary."

In an article she wrote that appears in the catalogue for an exhibition of ancient Chinese jadeware, held previously at the Nanjing Museum, Teng elaborated on her idea. "By 3500 BC, jade pieces were being made across China to serve various purposes, among which was the facilitation of communication between the heaven and the earth, the mortal and the immortal," she wrote. "While eastern China at the time featured mainly watery lowlands — it still does today — the expansive terrain in western China gradually rose up to form plateaus with a dry climate. The two parts were further divided by a chain of mountain ranges that runs northeast to southwest.

"These geographical and environmental factors had most likely worked their way into the jade cultures that developed relatively independently in the two vast regions. In the east, a strong animal worship formed; in the west, primitive veneration of celestial bodies evolved," she says, citing Liangzhu and Qijia as salient examples of the two traditions.

Asked whether this was because the warm, humid weather of eastern China was more of a haven for animals, while the western highlands lent their inhabitants an unhindered panorama, making them feel closer to the heavens, Teng says that, although this might be the case, she would generally refrain from saying so, since jade and pottery items produced in the western regions around this time also featured a variety of animal images.

Spiritual evolution

The Nanjing Museum exhibition, which ended last month, included a rather special piece believed to have belonged to an early stage of the Liangzhu culture. Featuring on one end a bird perching atop a beast held up high by a kneeling man, the piece tapers down toward the other end to form a pointy finish, which probably had been once inserted into a wooden pole to form a scepter-like wand wielded by an officiant during ritual ceremonies.

"Seeing birds piercing through clouds or beasts roaming the boundless earth aroused in the people of Liangzhu a sense of devotion they had always harbored toward the heaven and the earth, the holy spirits of which they believed these animals embodied," says Zuo Jun, curator of the exhibition.

Reflecting on the symbolism of the iconic Liangzhu jade cong, Fang believes that they amount to an enunciation of "the Liangzhu people's view of the universe".

"From the top to bottom, the cylinder — if it can be called one — has a very slight taper. If you have the experience of standing in an open field surveying your surroundings, with an unobstructed view, you would know that the earth is a circle — or at least appears so to you — with its border defined by where it meets the heaven. The heaven, of course, is also a circle, albeit a bigger one encompassing you," he says.

Teng would have said almost exactly the same thing about the jade cong from both Miaodigou and Qijia. Only that she believes the elevated terrains of western China, the prehistoric jade tradition of which is exemplified by the two cultures, is where the jade cong had originated, not the low-lying delta home of the Liangzhu culture.

"The Liangzhu jade cong — if they could be called so — were derived from a type of wide jade bracelet known today as cong-style bracelets, that have been unearthed in large numbers from the sites. Therefore, although the Liangzhu cong did bear a striking resemblance to the jade cong from western China, they are better examined within their own cultural framework," she says.

"While the cong-style bracelets continued to exist toward the end of the Liangzhu culture, the Liangzhu jade cong gradually stopped being pieces of ornamental art to take on other, more significant duties, including functioning as a cultural emblem and a communicative tool between the terrestrial and the celestial." (The Liangzhu cong believed to have fallen into the latter category are often too chunky or feature an opening that's too small for a hand to be put through, ruling out the possibility of them being wrist accessories.)

To better perform that function, the jade cong that appeared during the later stages of the Liangzhu culture tended to grow higher and "be closer to the heaven", to use Zuo's words.

"One of the ways ancient people performed sacrificial ceremonies using ritual jades was to burn them, believing that the smoke generated in the process would help accomplish the mission," says Zuo. "We know this thanks to what was recorded on the oracle bones during China's Shang Dynasty between the 16th and 11th centuries BC."

According to similar recordings, ritual jades had also been buried or sunk in water in honor of the earth and the rivers. At Shimao, a late Neolithic to early Bronze Age site in Shenmu, Shaanxi province, northwestern China, ceremonial jade axes and shovels have also been found inside the stonewalled platforms of a palatial complex, dated to around 2000 BC.

Circles of influences

Reflecting on the differing views concerning the origin of jade cong and their westward — or eastward — spread, Zuo believes that a lot more archaeological evidence is needed before "we can arrive tentatively at any conclusion".

"Chances are we may never be totally convinced one way or the other, since the very nature of such exchanges is that it was a two-way street. And, what actually happened must have been infinitely more complicated than what we could possibly gather from all vestiges of the past," he says. "What we do know, however, is that the cumulative total of these cultural interactions extended across both time and space. And it included the formation of a whole set of rules governing the use of ritual jades, articulated for the first time in the book Rites of Zhou."

Although the book was once tentatively attributed to a younger brother of the founder of the Zhou Dynasty (c. 11th century-256 BC), these days, a greater number of scholars believe that it was written somewhere between the 5th and 3rd century BC. In it, the author came up with the concept of six archetypes of ritual jade, which, apart from the prismatic tube that is cong, also included bi, a disc with a hole in the center, which Teng believes was born out of ancient people's observation of the sun's journey across the sky.

Another two types are hu, which took not only the shape of a tiger but also its pronunciation in Chinese, and huang, which often resembled a double-headed dragon or — on fewer occasions — a tiger. (For those in the know, the arch or half-ring shaped huang is highly evocative of one ancient character that had been etched on oracle bones during China's Shang Dynasty between the 16th and 11th century BC, meaning "rainbow".)

Teng believes that her theory applies here. "The jade hu and huang, connected to the worship of animal-spirits, were mainly found at prehistoric sites in eastern China," she says. "As to bi, although they were much more ubiquitous during the period, the bigger ones that were clearly ritualistic rather than ornamental seem to have made their first appearance in Miaodigou culture around 3500 BC, where they were buried separately from the jade cong."

"The two were later combined in Qijia culture, clearly serving as two of its dominating forms of ritual jade as they both expressed the cosmological views of the people," she says.

On top of these four, the Zhou people added another two: gui and zhang, the shape of which indicated that both had developed from weaponry. "The symbolic significance of the jade gui and zhang attested to the ascending role of an army in a society, as that society became a powerful state," says Zuo.

Zuo was talking about Xia (c. 21st century-16th century BC), considered by most to be the first dynasty in traditional Chinese historiography. One of the most recognizable types of ritual jade associated with Xia is known today as yazhang, or "toothed zhang" thanks to the two rows of small teeth jutting out from right above its handle. (It's worth noting that although the academic world has debated over whether direct link had existed between the yazhang of Xia and the zhang as listed by the Rites of Zhou, all agree that both symbolized military power.)

Up until now, four pieces of jade yazhang have been unearthed at Erlitou, an archaeological site in Central China's Henan province. The site is long deemed to be the one-time capital of Xia, a Bronze Age culture that existed in the Yellow River region, from where its influence rippled outward in all directions, across the entire land of modern-day China and beyond.

"From the Yellow River Basin to the Yangtze River Basin and then the Pearl River Basin in southern China and continental Southeast Asia including Vietnam, the jade zhang has proven as effective a traveler as other types of ritual jade, most notably cong and bi," says Zuo.

Between them, China was coming together fast. Xia, whose ancestors migrated to the Yellow River valley from northwestern China, was followed by the dynasty of Shang, founded by people hailing from the country's northeast.

When Shang eventually met its end in the 11th century BC, it was overthrown by the founders of Zhou who entered the spotlight of history from roughly the same area as the ancestors of Xia, that is, the upper and middle reaches from the Yellow River in northwestern China.

"One remarkable aspect of the rule of Zhou was that it reaffirmed the role of ritual jades in ceremonies considered essential to the well-being of a country, and that it did so in a way that had taken into full account the history of the various jade cultures that had been accumulating up to that point," says Teng.

According to Zuo Zhuan (The Commentary of Zuo), an ancient Chinese narrative history authored by a man named Zuo Qiuming in around the 5th century BC, Yu, the legendary first ruler of the Xia Dynasty who is known for his flood-control efforts, once convened a meeting of various tribal leaders, each holding "jades and silks" as tokens to be exchanged.

Those who doubt whether jade had a role to play in an occasion like this one only need to look at some jade plaques dated to around the 5th century BC that have been unearthed from Houma, Shanxi province in northern China.

The words written on their surface in minced cinnabar turned out to be the content of a covenant, into which all attending parties had entered.

In another book credited to Zuo Qiuming, a vassal king who lived around the same time was told by his trusted counselor that silk and jade should be offered to heaven since they, emanating the same soft shine, were "the essence of the cosmos". The fact that this man, who went by the name Guan She Fu, was a statesman as well as a theologian, speaks about the prominence of jade in the overlapping worlds of politics and religion in China before the Common Era.

In the following centuries, as silk, exported to the rest of the world, came to represent China for those dwelling in faraway lands, jade continued its hold on the imagination of the Chinese, who never stopped pondering and reflecting on the relationship between man and nature.