Westerners who study China should keep in mind the antiquity of this great country’s civilization, which was already three thousand years old when Titus sacked Jerusalem and Roman legions occupied Britain.
Williams, writing as a scholar and linguist in the China of fifty years ago, could not conceive the vast changes that lay in the immediate future. He lived among Chinese who believed in their folklore and religions. Today we must take a look at the contemporary scene. The simple fact is that China has adopted a system that has required the ousting of old-style Chinese landlords and administrators, who were primarily Confucian-trained. Changes unparalleled in 5,000 years of Chinese history have had disintegrating effects on Chinese art.
Chinese folkways and art symbols survived the perennial ravages of feudal wars and stultifying bureaucracies over a dozen dynasties. Can traditional custom and viable ancient art survive the mass-education programs of modern Chinese communism, which rejects belief in the ancient superstitions of folklore and the teachings of the three classic religions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism?
Twentieth-century communism is a Western invention of the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx, who wrote away in the library of the British Museum in London. China has its traditional communism and the common sense to adapt and reform. From the wu, the formless, the Chinese forever strive for yu, the formful. From the nonlogical emerges the logical—a mode of thinking alien to the scientific West that thousands of Westerners are now adopting.
Before World War II the majority of Chinese had great faith in the protective power of amulets or magical symbols and implicit trust in the benevolent influence of ancestor spirits. Social and economic reforms have swept away the old bases of Chinese culture: religions and folklore. Respect for the past remains. Temples have become museums. Archaeological recovery is intense. But communist art employs techniques of Western realism as a medium of instilling political ideals, as in the Soviet Union. Whether such innovations are right or wrong is not the concern of this book. Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives is a handbook of traditional modes and art that predate Chinese communism, although common sense suggests that much must survive in modern China.
Let us then turn to the basis of Chinese art symbolism. What is the foundation of Chinese thought that gave existence to these fascinating forms? The answer is best found in the evolution of human thought in the ancient Asian and Pacific world. We know that animism prevailed for thousands of years in Asia, that all natural things whether organic or inorganic were believed to possess an independent spirit. Often these spirits inhabited rocks, trees, or animals and were regarded as the souls of dead ancestors who actively cared for their living descendants. Some of the spirits were fabulous creatures, but all supernatural entites influenced the affairs of living mortals. Natural phenomena such as rainbows or mists also acted as vehicles for ancestral spirits or the gods themselves. These concepts engendered a great respect for nature that has survived intact in some Oriental religions, such as Japanese Shintoism.
Reverence for birds is a special characteristic of Oriental animism, for birds suggest the free soul. Supernatural creatures, such as the dragon, were as real in the imaginations of the ancient Chinese as were the living creatures before their eyes.
The sophisticated religions modified ancient animisms. Five hundred years before Christ the teachings of Lâo Zî, Confucius, and latterly the Indian doctrine of Buddha gave to the East its enduring ideals of life and death. Oriental art is thus both philosphical and religious, founded on a primitive animism that became submerged. And thus Chinese art has two distinct phases—that of animism in the ages of stone or bronze, followed by that of the historical dynasties based on the classic religions. The transitional dynasty is conventionally the Táng (A.D. 618–906), but overlaps are many. The pre-Táng period is especially characterized by motifs that are strongly animistic, employing dragons and “demon” ancestral masks in abundance.
The second phase is richer in religious symbols of a complicated kind that are mostly inspired by the concepts of Buddhism: Bodhisattvas, angels, gate guardians, devils, and saints. In this second era, classic art reached its highest point in the achievements of the Sòng Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279), notably in painting and ceramics. Sòng painting abounds in naturalistic birds, fish, flowers, plants and mountains. Man is seen contemplating nature as an inconspicuous yet unique part of nature.
As a general rule the symbols of Chinese art become less ritualistic or magical as the dynasties proceed in time; yet, as we see in Williams, the basic animistic motifs such as the dragon persist through all epochs of Chinese art. In fact there is a persistent unity in Chinese art. The fabulous dragon seen in Shāng art one or two thousand years before Christ still looks out at us from the walls of Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong, Honolulu, London, New York and San Francisco.
The fashionable European taste for “Chinoiserie” has a history of at least three hundred years, over which time the Chinese, ever good businessmen, exploited the market by producing the exotic curiosities the Western barbarians wanted. Some of the Chinese exports are beautiful yet far from typical. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scholars got to the principles of real Chinese art. Private collectors and museums then acquired the vast collections now to be seen in America and Europe. America has superb collections of Chinese art in institutions from Boston and Washington in the East to San Francisco and Honolulu in the West.
Archaeological finds in China are now protected by the Chinese communist government, a happy change from the times prior to World War II, when tomb robbing was a profession made lucrative by Western demand for Chinese art objects. Such thievery today would bring swift retribution in the form of a prison sentence.
When and where did Chinese art have its beginning? The answer is far from simple. Environmental changes over thousands of years as well as racial and ethnic complexities in what we now call China, from its frigid north to its subtropical south, gave rise to many Chinese cultures. Before the rise of the Shāng and Zhōu Dynasties, which mark the “modern” beginning of Chinese art, with their kuï or fabulous dragons and the tāotiè ancestral mask, there is a lengthy prehistoric art. Half a million years before the dynastic eras in the Lower Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, Peking man roamed the plains and hills of Chinese Asia. About 40,000 B.C., at the onset of the Upper Paleolithic Age, modern man emerged. Distinctive Chinese art symbols first made their appearance in the Chinese Neolithic (polished stone tool age) in the Yangshao culture, which emerged about 2,500 B.C. to endure a thousand years. The pottery of the early Yangshao exhibits patterns in red pigments that proceed in time through simple linear motifs to “primitive” conventionalized renderings of men and animals. From these early pictographic symbols, Chinese written characters evolved to highly abstract ideographic writing.
An astonishing fact of Chinese art is the sudden appearance in the Shāng Dynasty (c. 1766–1121 B.C.) of sophisticated bronze vessels bearing art motifs that are typically “Chinese” and are the progenitors of certain Chinese art symbols that have persisted for three or four thousand years. The Zhōu Dynasty (c. 1122–256 B.C.) developed the superb bronze art of the Shāng in such forms as time and circumstances required. These vessels were made for use in rituals performed to gain the favor of ancestral or other spirits. The archaic written Chinese characters inscribed on them provide information both on the development of writing and on their use as ritual offering vessels.
Diversity is characteristic of all Chinese art, both dynastic and pre-dynastic. Stylistic changes emerge from technical inventions or cultural preference. Basic media included stone, bronze, jade, shell, ceramics, silver, gold, silk, wood, and lacquer. The Hàn Dynasty (202 B.C. to A.D. 221) exhibited many of the cultural refinements of life that we regard today as typical of classic Chinese life. Silk, lacquer, and the writing brush appeared. We know much about the