./•«* i* Tar j&vt v mm** * ^3TS *.v* if>2 > » "i ■ ^riKtU ry *>#■ L161— O-1096 2JUv. -i *&*> X m PUBLICATION OF FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES Vol. X. A Chicago, U. S. A. 1912 Field Museum of Natural History. Publication 154. Anthropological Series. Vol. X. JADE A STUDY IN CHINESE ARCHEOLOGY AND RELIGION BY Berthold Laufer Plates, 6 of which are colored, and 204 Text-figures The Mrs. T. B. Blackstone Expedition Chicago, U. S. A. February, 1912. v PREFACE At the close of the year 1907 the Field Museum honored me with the task of carrying on research and making collections in Tibet and China for a period of three years, extending from 1908 to 1910, under an endowment liberally provided by Mrs. T. B. Blackstone of this city. The results of the expedition, accordingly, cover two distinct fields — an ethnological collection bearing on Tibet and neighboring regions, inclusive of an abundance of material relative to Lamaism (paintings, images, masks, objects of the cult), and an extensive collec- - tion illustrating the archaeology of China. The latter has been planned in such a way as to afford an insight into the development of all phases of life in China's past. In conformity with the tendency of this Insti- tution, this group of collections is not by any means intended to illustrate the development of art but of culture in China. The results of the work in Tibet are designed to be brought out in six volumes. It has been proposed to work up the Chinese material in a series of monographs, the first instalment of which is the present publication. The mortuary clay figures, the bronze and iron age of China, Buddhist stone sculpture, are the subjects contemplated for the next issues. This volume does not pretend to be a contribution to sinology. Its general scope is explained in the Introduction. Written, in the first place, to furnish the necessary information on the jade collection in the Field Museum, it applies to students of archaeology and religion in that it furnishes a great deal of new material and research on the early development of religious and artistic thought in ancient China. All specimens, with the exception of the jade and stone implements 9. on Plates IX-XIII, and of the jade book on Plate XIV, are in the y Field Museum and form part of the Mrs. T. B. Blackstone collection. The lack of Chinese types is met by two expediencies. In all j a illustrations derived from Chinese books, the Chinese titles accompany- ing them have been reproduced in facsimile, so that the Chinese designa- tions for the various types of jade will be easily recognized. Wherever v. necessary, in using Chinese words romanized, references are made in parenthesis to the number of the particular character in Giles's Chinese - gf English Dictionary, which is on the desk of every student in this field. ij The second revised and enlarged edition, as far as it has appeared •°i (four fascicules), is quoted throughout; for the remainder the first edition is referred to. Professor Giles deserves hearty congratulation 312467 ii Preface. on the completion of this monumental work, which is marked by progress and new results on every page, and for which every student of Chinese is largely indebted to him. As our archaeological research advances, the necessity of a special archaeological dictionary will be more and more felt. The generosity of Mrs. T. B. Blackstone in contributing a fund toward the printing of this volume is gratefully acknowledged. I have to thank Dr. O. C. Farrington, Curator of Geology, for the mineralogical definitions of many specimens, and Mr. H. W. Nichols, Assistant Curator of Geology, for manifold advice on technical ques- tions. The manuscript was completed in October, 191 1. Berthold Laufer, Associate Curator of Asiatic Ethnology. Chicago, February, 19 12. CONTENTS List of Illustrations v Introduction i I. Jade and Other Stone Implements 29 II. Jade Symbols of Sovereign Power 80- III. Astronomical Instruments of Jade 104 IV. Jade as Writing-Material 114 V. Jade in Religious Worship — The Jade Images of the Cosmic Deities 120 1. Jade Images and Symbols of the Deity Earth . . 122 2. Jade Images and Symbols of the Deity Heaven . 154 3. Jade Images of the. North, East and South . 169 4. Jade Images of the Deity of the West .... 174 5. Jade Images of the Dragon 186 VI. Jade Coins and Seals 190 VII. Personal Ornaments of Jade 194 1. The Girdle-Pendant 194 2. The Development of the Girdle-Pendants . 217 3. Ornaments for Headgear and Hair 249 4. Jade Clasps 256 5. Jade Buckles 262 6. Sword Ornaments of Jade 274 7. The Jade Court-Girdles of the T'ang Dynasty . 286 VIII. Jade Amulets of the Dead 294 IX. Jade Objects used in Dressing the Corpse . . 306 X. Jade Carvings of Fishes, Quadrupeds and Human Figures in the Grave 309 XI. Vases of Jade 315 XII. Jade in the Eighteenth Century . . . . 324 Appendix I. Jade in Buddhist Art 341 Appendix II. The Nephrite Question of Japan . 351 Bibliography 355 Index 361 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TEXT-FIGURES » Page I. Ancient Jade Axe (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 41 2-3. Jade Dance-Axes (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 42 4. Hatchet of Yellow Red-Spotted Jade 43 5-6. Ancient Bronze Hatchets (from Kin-shih so) 44 7. Perforated Stone Chisel from Shantung (after Sketch furnished by Mr. Couling) 47 8. Three Stone Arrow-Heads (from Kin-shih so) 61 9. Stone Implements (from Pen ts'ao kang mu) 65 10. Stone Hatchets in an Ornamental Composition (from Fang-shih mo p'u) 67 11. Spade-Shaped Bronze Coin (from Specimen in Field Museum, Cat- alogue No. 1 16958) 74 12-13. Bronze Hatchets of Han Period (from Specimens in American Museum, New York) 74. 75 14. Spade-Shaped Celts (after Grunwedel) 76 15-17. Reconstructions of the Jade Tablets huan kuei (15), sin kuei (16), and kung kuei (17) (from the Palace Edition of the Li ki) . . 85 18. Jade Disk with "Grain" Pattern according to the Notions of the Sung Period (from the Palace Edition of the Li ki) .... 86 19. Jade Disk with "Rush" Pattern according to the Notions of the Sung Period (from Same Source) 86 20-22. Jade Hammer-Shaped Symbols of Imperial Power, chin kuei . . 87, 90 23-24. Jade Hammer and Knife-Shaped Symbols of Imperial Power, chen kuei and ta kuei 92 25-27. Round Jade Tablets, yuan kuei 93 28. Jade Tablet, ts'ing kuei 95 29. Pointed Jade Tablet, yen kuei 95 30. Jade Tablet with "Grain" Pattern, ku kuei, Upper and Lower Faces 96 31. Jade Tablet kuei on a Han Bas-Relief (from Kin-shih so) 97 32-33- Jade Tablets, kuei 98 34. Jade Tablet, chang 101 35. Jade Tablet, ya chang 102 36. Jade Astronomical Instrument, siian-ki 105 37. Lower Face of Astronomical Instrument in Fig. 36 107 38. Jade of the Tribes I (I yii) 108 39. The Ring pi-liu-li (from Kin-shih so) no 40. Imperial Jade Tablet Am for writing 116 41-46. Alleged Jade Wheel-Naves (from Ku yii t'u p'u) . . 123, 126-128 47. Green Jade Tube, ta ts'ung 130 48. Black Jade Tube, ta ts'ung 131 49~5o. Jade Tubes, huang ts'ung 132 1 Chinese drawings with no indication of source are derived from the book of Wu Ta-ch'ing (see Introduction, p. 12). v vi List of Illustrations. Page 51-56. Yellow Jade Tubes, huang ts'ung I33_i35 57. Yellow Jade Ring, huang ts'ung 136 58-59. Tubes, tsu ts'ung, of White Jade with Black Veins 137 60. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of White Jade with Manicolored Spots . . . 138 61. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Yellow Jade with White Veins 139 62. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of White Jade with Green and Red Spots . . . 140 63. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Drab-colored Jade with a Zone of Clayish Matter 140 64. Tube, tsu ts'ung, Green Jade with Russet Spots and "a Zone per- meated by Mercury" 141 65. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Green Jade with Zone of Clayish Matter . 141 66. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Yellow Jade, "Permeated by Mercury" . . 142 67. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Green Jade with Black Zone interspersed with White Specks 142 68. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of Yellow Jade with Russet Spots 143 69. Tube, tsu ts'ung, of White Jade with Russet Spots 143 70. Jade Image of Earth in the Temple of Earth, Peking (from Huang ch'ao li k'i t'u shih) 151 71. Jade Disk with "Grain" Pattern, ku pi 158 72. Jade Disk with Basketry Design, p'u pi 159 73. Jade Disk, pi, Upper and Lower Faces 160, 161 74. Jade Disk, pi, decorated with Dragon and Bird Heads .... 162 75. Jade Disk, ku pi, with Band-Ornaments 163 76. Jade Image huang of the North 170 77. Jade Image huang of the North 170 78. Jade huang in the Shape of a Fish 170 79. Jade of the Type huang 171 80. Jade of the Type huang (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 171 81. Jade Tablet, Upper and Lower Faces, with Design of Tiger, used in the Worship of the West . 176 82. Jade Carving of Tiger's Head, Upper and Lower Faces . . . . 177 83. Jade Carving of Tiger 178 84. Jade Carving of Tiger, Upper and Lower Faces, buried to the West of the Corpse 179 85. Jade Carving of Tiger, Reconstruction (from Ku yii t'u p'u) . 180 86-87. Bronze Sonorous Instruments of the Chou Period (from Po ku t'u, edition of 1603) 180 88. Bronze Sonorous Instrument of the Chou Period, in Shape of Tiger (from Po ku t'u, edition of 1603) . 181 89. Bronze Sonorous Instrument of the Chou Period (from Same Source) 181 90. Jade Carving of Tapir (alleged Tiger, from K'ao ku t'u) .... 181 91. Jade Carving of Dragon used in Prayers for Rain 186 92. Jade Carving of Dragon 187 93. Jade Carving of Dragon 188 94. Ancient Metal Coin with Round Perforation (from Kin ting ts'icn lu) 192 95. Complete View of the Ancient Jade Girdle-Pendant (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 198 96-99. Jade Head-Pieces of Girdle-Pendants ' 200 100-101. Jade Lower Side-Pieces of Girdle Pendant 202 List of Illustrations. vii Page 1 02. Jade Head- Piece of Girdle- Pendant (from Same Source) . . . 203 103. Jade Head-Piece of Girdle-Pendant in Shape of Lotus-Leaf (from Same Source) 203 104. Jade Chatelaine from Turkistan (from Same Source) .... 204 105-106. Jade Central Pieces of Girdle-Pendant (from Same Source) . 205 107-108. Jade Central Side-Pieces of Girdle-Pendant (from Same Source) 207 109. Lower Central Piece of Girdle-Pendant (from Same Source) 208 no. Jade Girdle- Ring with Cloud-Band (from Same Source) . 212 in. Jade Girdle-Ring in Shape of Cloud-Band (from Same Source) ». 212 112. Jade Girdle-Ring in Shape of Coiled Clouds (from Same Source) 213 113. Jade Girdle-Ring with Design of Phenix (from Same Source) . 213 114. 'Jade Girdle- Ring with Design of Auspicious Plants (from Same Source) : 214 115. Jade Girdle-Ring with Coiled Hydra (from Same Source) . . . 214 116. Jade Girdle-Ring in Shape of Cloud-Band (from Same Source) 215 117. Incomplete Jade Ring, kiieh, Upper and Lower Faces . . .216 118-119. Jade Girdle-Pendants, Pairs of Fishes (from Ku yu t'u p'u) 218 120-121. Jade Girdle-Pendants, Pairs of Phenixes or Peacocks (from Same Source) 221 122. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Two Hydras, Upper and Lower Faces (from Same Source) 223 123. Jade Girdle-Pendant, "The Fragrant Herb" (from Same Source) 223 124. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Butterfly (from Same Source) 223 125. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Coiled Dragon (from Same Source) . . . 224 126. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Twisted Band (from Same Source) . . 224 127. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Coiled Hydra (from Same Source) . . 224 128. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Coiled Hydra with Rodent (from Same Source) 224 129. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Hydra and Bird-Head (from Same Source) . 225 130. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Hatchet Design (from Same Source) . . . 225 131. Jade Girdle- Pendant, Cicada, Upper and Lower Faces (from Same Source) 226 132. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Cloud-Dragon (from Same Source) 226 J33- Jade Girdle-Pendant, Single Fish (from Same Source) .... 226 134. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Winding Dragon (from Same Source) . 228 !35- Jade Girdle-Pendant, Tiger (from Same Source) 228 136. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Upper and Lower Faces, Single Hydra (from Same Source) 229 137. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Coiled Hydra (from Same Source) 229 138. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Upper and Lower Faces, Couple of Hydras (from Same Source) 230 139. Jade Girdle-Pendant, Upper and Lower Faces, Playing Hydras (from Same Source) 230 140-141. Jade Girdle-Pendants, Upper and Lower Faces, Playing Hydras (from Same Source) 231 142. Dragon-Shaped Girdle- Pendant of White Jade with Russet Spots 236 143. Hydra-Shaped Girdle-Pendant of Green Jade with Russet Spots . 236 144. Dragon-Shaped Girdle-Pendant of White Jade with Yellow Mist 237 145. Girdle-Pendant with Designs of Aquatic Plants, of White Jade with Russet Spots 238 viii List of Illustrations. Page 146. Green Jade Ornament with Design of Bird and Dragon . . . 239 147. Girdle-Ornament, with Cloud-Pattern, of White Jade with Black Stripes 240 148. Large Jade Implement to loosen Knots 241 149. Small Jade Implement to loosen Knots 241 150. Jade Implement to loosen Knots (from Ku yii t'u p'u) .... 242 151. " Jade Horse " on a Han Bas-Relief (from Kin-shih so) .... 244 152. Jade Carving of Recumbent Horse of the T'ang Period (from Ku yii t'u) 245 153. Jade Carving of Standing Horse. Feet were restored and Figure of Man was added in the Yuan Period (from Ku yii t'u) . . . 246 154-155. Jade Buttons, Upper and Lower Faces 250 156. Jade Hat-Pin (from Ku yii t'u p'u) . . . '. 251 157. Cap showing Wear of Jade Pin, after Sketch by the Painter Li Kung- lin (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 251 158. Jade Bonnet-Pendants worn by the Empress 252 159. Earring of White Jade, Upper and Lower Sides 253 160. Jade Earrings 254 161. Jade Girdle-Clasp, Front and Back (from Ku yii t'u p'u) . . . 257 162. Jade Girdle-Clasp, suei, White Jade with Red Spots all over and a Zone of inserted Clayish Matter 258 163-165. Girdle-Clasps of White Jade (with Addition of Light-Red Tinge in 165) 258, 259, 260 166. Buckle of White Jade with Yellow Mist, Back and Front . . 263 167. White Jade Buckle, Side and Front 263 168. Ancient Jade Buckle with the Motive "Mantis catching the Cicada " (from Ku yii t'u p'u) . . . . • 264 169. The Praying-Mantis t'ang-lang (from San ts'ai t'u hui, Edition of 1607) 266 170. Ancient Jade Buckle with Head of Antelope (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 268 171. Ancient Jade Buckle with Head of p'i-sieh (from Same Source) . 269 172. Ancient Jade Buckle with Head of the Animal V ien-lu (from Same Source) 269 173. Ancient Jade Buckle, with Dragon-Head in the Style of the Painter Chang SSng-yu of the Sixth Century (from Same Source) . . 270 174. Jade Buckle with Head of Dragon, Mediaeval (from Same Source) 271 175. Jade Buckle with Head of Phenix, Mediaeval (from Same Source) . 272 176. Ancient Jade Buckle with Horse-Head and Hydra (from Same Source) 272 177. Sword-Guard of Red Jade with Clayish Substances 275 178. Sword-Guard of White Jade 275 179-180. Sword Guards of White Jade with Russet Dots 277 181. Sword-Guard of Green Jade with Black Stripes and Russet Dots in them 278 182-183. Jade Ornaments, peng, for the Mouth of Scabbards, White Jade (182) and Green Jade with Clayish Substances (183) . . .' 279 184. Jade Ornament, pi, for Lower End of Scabbard, White Jade inter- spersed with Russet Dots 280 185. Jade Ornament, pi, for Lower End of Scabbard, White Jade inter- spersed with Russet Specks 281 List of Illustrations. ix Page 1 86. White Jade Ornament, pi, for Lower End of Scabbard . . 282 187. White Jade Ornament, pi, for Lower End of Scabbard .... 283 188. Jade Ornaments for Scabbard (from K'ao ku t'u) 284 189. King Wu of Ch'u, after Painting by Ku K'ai-chih (from K'ao ku t'u) 285 190. White Jade Court-Girdle with Dragon-Designs of the T'ang Period (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 287 191. Jade Court-Girdle of the Emperors of the T'ang Dynasty (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 288 192. Jade Court-Girdle of the Officials of the T'ang Dynasty, ornamented with Bats and Clouds (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 289 193. Jade Court-Girdle of the Empress of the T'ang Dynasty, with Per- sian Floral Designs (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 290 194. Jade Court-Girdle of the T'ang Dynasty, sent as tribute from Khotan (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 291 195. Central Plaques from Jade Court-Girdle of the T'ang Dynasty, with Mountain Scenery (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 293 196. Lower Face of Tongue-Amulet shown in Plate XXXVI, Fig. 2 . . 300 197. Ancient Jade Carving of the Monster p'i-sieh, used as Paper- weight by the Painter Chao Meng-fu (from Ku yii t'u) . . . 313 198. Jade Cup of the Chou Period 316 199. Jade Vase of the Chou Period 317 200. Ancient Jade Bowl, dug up in Feng-siang fu 317 201. "Brushing the Elephant of Samantabhadra," in the Style of the Painter Yen Li-pen. Jade Carving of the Period 907-911 a. d. (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 342 202. "Brushing the Elephant" (Woodcut from Fang-shih mo p'u) . 340 203. Ancient Jade Carving representing the Bodhisatva Samantabhadra (from Ku yii t'u p'u) 347 204. Picture of Samantabhadra by SesshQ (from Japanese Wood- Engraving) 349 PLATES Opp. Page I. Nephrite Bowlders 26 Fig. 1. Water- rolled Pebble of Jade of the Han Period. Cat. No. 1 16497. Fig. 2. Bowlder from Khotan, Turkistan. Cat. No. 1 16498. II. Jade Chisels of Chou Period, from Shensi Province. Cat. Nos. 1 16499, 1 16502, 1 16500 35 III. Jade Hammer of Chou Period from Shensi Province. Cat. No. 116511 36 IV. Jade Chisel of Chou Period, from Shensi Province. Cat. No. 116503 37 V. Jade Chisels of Chou Period from Shensi Province. Cat. Nos. 1 16504, 1 16506, 1 16509 37 VI. Jade Chisels and other Implements of Chou Period, from Shensi Province. Cat. Nos. 1 16505, 116501, 116514, 1165 7 . . . 38 List of Illustrations. Opp. Page VII. Jade and Bronze Chisels of Chou Period, from Shensi Province . 38 Fig. 1. Jade Chisel, a Front, b Side-view. Cat. No. 118001. Fig. 2. Bronze Chisel for Comparison with Stone Type. Cat. No. 1 16723. VIII. Jade Chisel and Knife of Chou Period, from Shensi Province. Cat. Nos. 116510, 1 16508 39 IX. Jade Dagger, probably Shang Period, from Shensi Province, in the Possession of H. E. Tuan Fang, Peking 40 X. Stone Chisels from Shantung Province, in Royal Scottish Mu- seum, Edinburgh 47 XL Stone Hammers from Shantung Province, in Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh 48 XII. Stone Pestles from Shantung Province, in Royal Scottish Mu- seum, Edinburgh . 49 XIII. Grooved Stone Axes 50 Fig. 1. Grooved Diorite Axe from Shantung Province, in British Museum, London. Fig. 2. Grooved Quartz Axe from India, in British Museum, London. After Rivett-Carnac. Fig. 3. Grooved Stone Hammer from Saghalin. After Iijima. Fig. 4. Grooved Stone Hammer of the Chukchi. After Bogoras XIV. Manchu and Chinese Document of the Emperor Shun-chih carved in Jade Slabs in 1648 118 XV. Jade Images and Symbols of the Deity Earth 122 Figs. 1-3. Jade Images of Earth. Cat. Nos. 116512, 116513, 1 16569. Figs. 4-5. Marble Symbols serving in the Sacrifices to Earth. Cat. Nos. 1 16590, 1 16589. XVI. Bronze Fittings of Chariot Wheel-Naves, Cat. Nos. 1 16894, 1 16896 127 XVII. Reconstructions in Plaster of Sacrificial Emblems 144 Fig. 1. Emblem serving in Sacrifices to Heaven. Cat. No. 1 17942. Fig. 2. Emblem in Sacrifices to Sun, Moon, Planets and Constellations. Cat. No. 1 17943. Fig. 3. Emblem in Sacrifices to the Mountains and Rivers. Cat. No. 1 17944. XVIII. Han Pottery Quadrangular Jar, with Inscription "Grain Vessel (kutou)," its Shape imitating the Image of Earth. Cat. No. 1 1 8383 152 XIX. Sung Glazed Pottery Vases shaped into the Image of Earth. Cat. Nos. 1 18377, 1 18378 152 . XX. Sung Glazed Pottery Vases shaped into the Image of Earth. Cat. Nos. 118381, 1 18382 153 XXI. (Colored.) Jade Disk representing Image of the Deity Heaven. Cat. No. 1 16575 '. . 156 XXII. (Colored.) Jade Disks Symbolic of the Deity Heaven. Cat. Nos. 116577, 116578 157 List of Illustrations. xi Opp. Page XXIII. Decorated Jade Disks of the Type pi 164 Fig. 1. Badge of Rank with Two Hydras in Relief. Cat. No. 1 16583. Fig. 2. Badge of Rank with "Grain" Pattern. Cat. No. 1 16580. Fig. 3. Jade Disk with Two Hydras and Spiral Decorations. Cat. No. 1 1 658 1. Fig. 4. Jade Disk with Engraved Hatchet Design on Both Faces. Cat. No. 1 16582. Fig. 5. Flat Jade Disk with Engraved Meander Ornaments. Cat. No. 1 16579. Fig. 6. Jade kuei pi used in Sacrificing to the Sun, Moon and Stars. Cat. No. 11 6591. Fig. 7. Fragment of Jade Disk. Cat No. 1 16586. XXIV. Jade Disk pi (Upper and Lower Faces, a and h). Cat. No. 116584. . 165 XXV. Jade Rings , 166 Figs. 1, 2, 4, 5. Jade Rings of the Type yuan. Cat. Nos. 1 16572, 1 16573, 116571, 1 16576. Fig. 3. Fragment of Jade Disk. Cat. No. 1 16585. Fig. 6. Unique Jadeite Ring with Projecting Ridge. Cat. No. 1 16587. Fig. 7. Ring of Red Agate. Cat. No. 1 16588. XXVI. Jade Ring of the Type huan. Cat. No. 11 6574 167 XXVII. Coins and Seals 190 Fig. 1. Jade Knife-Coin of Wang Mang. Cat. No. 1 16609. Figs. 2, 3. Copper Knife-Coins of Wang Mang. Cat. Nos. 116610, 116611. Figs. 4, 5. Jade Seals. Cat. Nos. 116608, 1 16607. XXVIII. Jade Ornaments of the Han Period 202 Fig. 1. Lower Side-Piece of a Girdle-Pendant. Cat. No. 1 16546. Fig. 2. Half-Ring kueh. Cat. No. 1 16556. Figs. 3, 4. Axe-Shaped Girdle-Ornaments. Cat. Nos. 1 16606, 1 16605. Fig. 5. Girdle-Ornament in Shape of Fungus of Immortality. Cat. No. 1 16558. Fig. 6. Ornament for Scabbard. Cat. No. 1 16568. Fig. 7. Archer's Thumb-Ring. Cat. No. 1 16570. XXIX. (Colored.) Jade Girdle-Ornaments of Women, Han Period. Cat. Nos. 1 16555, 1 16552, 1 16553, 1 16554 233 XXX. Designs on the Lower Faces of the Girdle-Ornaments in Figs. 1, 3 and 4 of Preceding Plate 233 XXXI. Jade Girdle-Pendants 241 Fig. 1. Carving of Reclining Horse and Monkey. Cat. No. 1 16594. Fig. 2. Carving of Elephant. Cat. No. 1 16597. Fig. 3. Carving of Recumbent Cow with Calf. Cat. No. 1 16594. xii List of Illustrations. Opp. Page Fig. 4. Carving of Two Goats. Cat. No. 1 16595. Fig. 5. Carving of Drake and Duck surrounded by Lotus- Flowers. Cat. No. 1 16602. Fig. 6. Carving of Two Mandarin-Ducks. Cat. No. 1 16599. Fig. 7. Carving of Dragon. Cat. No. 1 16642. Fig. 8. Pendant with Carving of Hydra. Cat. No. 1 16644. XXXII. Carvings of Animals 243 Fig. 1. Carving of Recumbent Mare and Poal, of White Jade. Cat. No. 1 16598. Fig. 2. Carving of Lion, of White Jade. Cat. Mo. 1 16603. Fig. 3. Carving of Crouching Tiger, of Rock- Crystal. Cat. No. 1 16654. XXXIII. (Colored.) Jade Clasps of the Han Period. Cat. Nos. 1 16559, 1 16563, 1 16562, 1 16560, 1 16564, 116561 259 XXXIV. Buckles of the Han Period 262 Fig. I. Jade Buckle with Horse-Head. Cat. No. 116566. Fig. 2. Jade Buckle with Dragon-Head. Cat. No. 1 16565. Fig. 3. Bronze Buckle incrusted with Silver Wire. Cat. No. 116851. XXXV. Sword-Guards of the Han Period 274 Fig. 1. Jade Sword-Guard (a Front, b Back, c Lower Side). Cat. No. 1 1 65 1 5. Fig. 2. Bronze Sword-Guard. Cat. No. 1 16806. XXXVI. Tongue- Amulets for the Dead 299 Figs. 1-4. Plain Types. Cat. Nos. 116517, 1 165 16, 116518, "6535. Fig. 5. Tongue- Amulet carved in Shape of Realistic Cicada (a Upper and b Lower Face). Cat. No. n65,M. Figs. 6-9. Tongue-Amulets showing conventionalized Forms of Cicada. Cat. Nos. 1 16530, 1 16532, 116519, 1 16533. XXXVII. Jade Amulets for the Dead 301 Figs. 1-3. Tooth-Shaped Tongue-Amulets. Cat. Nos. 1 16527, 1 16526, 1 16525. Figs. 4-5. Miniature Tongue-Amulets for Women and Chil- dren. Cat. Nos. 1 16529, 1 16528. Figs. 6-8. Navel-Amulets. Cat. Nos. 1 16545, 1 16547, 1 16548. Figs. 9-1 1. Prism-Shaped Amulets. Cat. Nos. 116551, 1 16550, 1 16549. XXXVIII. Jade Amulets for the Dead 303 Fig. 1. a and b. Pair of Eye- Protecting Amvlets. Cat. No. 1 16534. Fig. 2. Presumably Eye- Amulet. Cat. No. 116548. Fig. 3. Eye-Amulet with Design of Fish. Cat. No. 1 16536. Figs. 4-7. Lip-Amulets, 4 and 7 in Shape of Fish. Cat. Nos. 1 16539, 1 16542, 116541, 1 16544. Figs. 8-9. Amulets in the Shape of Monsters. Cat. Nos. 1 16543, 1 16557. XXXIX. Clay Disks of Han Period, used in Dressing the Corpse. Cat. Nos. 1 18384, 1 18385 306 List of Illustrations. xiii Opp. Page XL. Jade and Bronze Objects of the Chou Period, used in Dressing the Corpse 307 Fig. 1. Jade Knob with Relief of Frog. Cat. No. 1 16520. Fig. .2. Cast-Bronze Knob with Relief of Frog. Cat. No. 116521. Fig. 3. Bronze Cast of Realistic Tigerhead. Cat. No. 1 16524. Fig.14 a and b. Pair of Monsters in Hollow Bronze Cast. Cat. No. 1 16523. Fig' 4 c. The Same, Side- View. Fig, 5. Bronze Cast with same Design, on Smaller Scale, used for Women. Cat. No. 1 16522. XLI. Jade Carvings of Fishes 309 Figs. 1, 2. Mortuary Fishes, Han Period. Cat. Nos. 1 16538, 1 16537. ' Fig- 3- For Comparison : Modern Carving of Fish with Lotus- Flowers. Cat. No. 33516. XLII. Mortuary Jade Carvings . . . . ' 310 Fig. 1. Full Figure of Butterfly in Open Work, Ts'in or Han Period. Cat. No. 116601. Fig. 2. Carving of Frog, Han Period. Cat. No. 1 16593. Fig. 3. Carving of Man, Han Period. Cat. No. 1 16604. XLIII. (Colored.) Jade Carving of Monster p'i-sieh, Han Period. Cat. No. 1 16600 311 XLIV. Jade Vase of Sung Period, Side and Front-view. Cat. No. ] 16612 319 XLV. Jade. Cups and Bowls 319 Fig. 1. Jade Cup surrounded by Hydras and Plum-Tree in ( High Undercut Reliefs, Ming Period. Cat. No. 1166,16. Fig. 2. Jade Bowl (View of Bottom) with Relief of Lotus, Ming Period. Cat. No. 116614. Fig- 3- Jade Loving-Cup, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16638. XLVI. Set of White Jade Ewer and Vase, Ming Period. Cat. Nos. 11 >6i7, 116618 320 XLVII. Incense-Burner carved from White Jade in Openwork, Ming Period. Cat. No. 116613 321 XLVIII. Yunnan- Marble Plate, Ming Period. Cat. No. 116615. . . .321 XLIX. Jade Vases of K'ien-lung Period 322 Fig.ji. Plain Flowervase of Yellow Han Jade. Cat. No. 116641. Fig. -. Flowervase Decorated with Floral Designs in Relief, carved from Han Jade. Cat. No. 1 16640. L. Green Bowl with Floral Reliefs in Cameo Style, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16632 322 LI. Bottom of Bowl shown in Preceding Plate 322 LII. Fruit-Dishes of White Jade, K'ien-lung Period 323 Fig. 1. Interior of Fruit-Dish. Cat. No. 116633, 1. Fig. 2. Exterior of Fruit- Dish. Cat. No. 1 16633, 3- Fig. 3. Pentagonal Fruit-Dish. Cat. No. 1 16634. xiv List or Illustrations. Opp. Page LIII. (Colored.) Bell carved from Han Jade, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16626 328 LIV. Resonant Stone carved from Jade, in Shape of Dragon, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16623 329 LV. Back of Jade Sonorous Stone shown in Preceding Plate . . . 329 LVI. Resonant Stone carved from Jade, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16624 329 LVII. Resonant Stone carved from Jade, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 116625 330 LVIII. Resonant Stone carved from Rock-Crystal. K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16653 330 LIX. Set of Jade Resonant Stone and Diskoid Badge of Rank, K'ien- lung Period. Cat. Nos. 1 16629, 1 16630 330 LX. White Jade Carving of Mountain Scenery, K'ang-hi Period. Cat. No. 116619 331 LXI. Back of Jade Carving in Preceding Plate 331 LXII. White Jade Screen, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 11 6620 . . 331 LXIII. Back of Jade Screen in Preceding Plate 331 LXIV. Jade Works of the K'ien-lung Period 332 Figs. 1-2, Girdle Ornaments in Openwork. Cat. Nos. 1 16646, 1 16645. Fig. 3. Carved Ink-Box. Cat. No. 1 16637. Fig. 4. Carving of Rock with Pine-Trees. Cat. No. n 6621. Fig. 5. Paper- Weight of Agate. Cat. No. 1 16639. LXV. Jade Works of the K'ien-lung Period 333 Fig. 1. Pair of White Jade Flutes. Cat No. 11 6631. Figs. 2-3. Girdle Buckles. Cat. Nos. 1 16592, 1 16643. Fig. 4. Ink-Slab with Design of Well. Cat. No. 1 16635. Fig. 5. Relief of Flowervase. Cat. No. 1 16622. LXVI. Jade Pomegranate Tree in Jar of Cloisonne" Enamel, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16652 334 LXVII. Jade Chrysanthemums in Jar of Cloisonne Enamel, K'ien-lung Period. Cat. No. 1 16652, 2 334 LXVIII. So-called Sceptres of Good Luck, K'ien-lung Period .... 335 Fig. 1. Cast Iron, Ornaments inlaid with Gold and Silver Wire. Cat. No. 1 17685. Fig. 2. Carved from Wood, inlaid with Three Plaques of White Jade. Cat. No. 1 16628. Fig. 3. Carved from White Jade with Three Reliefs. Cat. No. 1 16627. INTRODUCTION "The Illustrated Mirror of Jades says: In the second month, the plants in the mountains receive a bright luster. When their leaves fall, they change into jade. The spirit of jade is like a beautiful woman." The two minerals nephrite and jadeite, popularly comprised under the name jade, belong to the hardest and most cherished materials of which primitive man availed himself in shaping his chisels, hatchets, ornaments, amulets and many other implements. Such objects, par- tially of considerable antiquity, have been found in many parts of the world — in Asia, New Zealand, in prehistoric Europe and America. The geographical areas occupied by nephrite are so extended that it may almost be classified with flint as one of those mineral substances utilized to a large extent by a great number of peoples. Since the localities where nephrite occurs in nature seem to be difficult to discover, and since nephrite was known for a long time as coming only from Asia and New Zealand, and jadeite merely from certain districts of Asia, the scientific world was being held in long suspense by what is known as the nephrite question. Though now a matter of historical interest, it may not be amiss to review it briefly for the instructive value which it bears on the development of science. At the time when Heinrich Fischer1 in Freiburg carried on his epoch- making investigations on the mineralogical and archaeological sides of crude and wrought jades, no places of the occurrence in situ of nephrite were known in either Europe or America. The problem, therefore, pivoted around the question as to how the peoples of these two parts of the world had obtained the material for their nephrite and jadeite objects. It then was a matter of natural consequence that Fischer should elaborate the theory that the nephrite objects in pre-Columbian America had been transported there, owing to an influx and settlement of Asiatic tribes, and that those brought to light in Europe were ac- counted for by the assumption of a prehistoric commercial intercourse with Asia, or by the migrations of peoples.2 This argument once 1 See Bibliography at end. s It should be remarked, by the way, that Fischer was a true scholar and most conscientious worker, and certainly greater in his lifelong error than many a minor demi-scholar who postfestum celebrated a cheap triumph over the end of the nephrite question. 2 Introduction. formed an important factor in the heated debate over the Indogermanic migrations and the original habitat of the group, and was exploited in favor of a supposition of an eastern origin of the neolithic culture of Europe.1 In 1900, Oscar Montelius (Die Chronologie der altesten Bronzezeit, p. 204) wrote: "There is much divergence of opinion on the often discussed question whether the numerous works of jadeite and nephrite excavated in southern and central Europe have to be explained as an importation from the Orient. I am of opinion that at all events some of these works are to be attributed to such an importa- tion." Fischer's theory was first attacked by A. B. Meyer in several papers, particularly "Die Nephritfrage kein Ethnologisches Problem" (Berlin, 1883; translated in American Anthropologist, Vol. I, 1888, pp. 231-242). First, Meyer thought it improbable that ready-made implements or unwrought stones should have been transported over oceans and wide tracts of land; an argument of no great validity, as there are, in the history of trade, numerous examples proving the con- trary. Secondly, he referred to localities, increasing from year to year, Where jade occurring in situ had become known. Captain I. H. Jacob- sen brought nephrite from Alaska, where it is found as a mineral and worked by the natives into numerous objects.2 In Europe, strata of nephrite were discovered in the eastern Alps in the Sann valley, near St. Peter, and in the Murr valley, near Graz. In Switzerland, bowlders of jadeite were sighted on Lake Neuenburg; even a sort of nephrite workshop was discovered in the vicinity of Maurach, where hatchets chiseled from the mineral and one hundred and fifty-four pieces of cuttings were found. At the foot of Mount Viso, in Italy, jadeite was met with in situ. Single erratic bowlders of nephrite in diluvial deposits had been signaled in Germany at an earlier date, near Schwemm- sal, Potsdam, and Leipzig, the latter weighing seventy-nine pounds (Fischer, pp. 3-5 et passim). Credner supposed that these three bowlders were transported through the ice from Scandinavia to their present localities. Another geologist, Traube, succeeded in discover- ing nephrite in situ in small bands and greater layers near Jordansmuhl in the serpentine strata of the Zobten mountains of Silesia. A large serpentine hatchet instratified with bands of nephrite is known from Gnichwitz only two miles distant from Jordansmuhl, and made from a material which agrees with the material of the latter locality. Thus, Fischer's ingenious hypothesis of importation or migration could no longer be upheld in regard to Germany. 1 Max Muller, Biographies of Words, Appendix II: The Original Home of Jade. London, 1888. 2 For further notes regarding the occurrence of jade in America, see article "Nephrite," by Mr. Hodge in Handbook of American Indians, Vol. II, pp. 55-56 (Washington, 19 10). Introduction. 3 The most important investigation in the direction of proving the indigenous origin of the jade objects of Switzerland was undertaken by A. Bodmer-Beder in Zurich.1 He made a great number of careful examinations of stone implements from the Swiss lake-dwellings and by comparing these with the analyses of the raw material found in Switzerland, he arrived at the conclusion that the species of nephrite met with in the nephrite objects of Lake Zug occurs in situ in the territory of the Gotthard, whence it arrived in the district of Zug through the movement of glaciers and rivers, and that also the human products discovered in the other lakes are of autochthonous material. Scientists are generally convinced now that the end of the nephrite question has come, that such a question no longer exists. It seems perfectly safe to assume that the ancient jade objects of Europe and America were not imported from Asia, but, for the greater part, manufactured on the spot. Certainly, it does not now follow that each and every jade object wherever found must be a local production, and that an historical inquiry is gagged forever. The channels of historical devel- opment are manifold and complex, and the working after an easy schematic routine is fatal and infertile. No lesser archaeologist than Sophus Muller (Urgeschichte Europas, p. 21, Strassburg, 1905) sounded a timely warning to this over-enthusiasm by remarking: "It is true, one has succeeded in recent years after long search in pointing out nephrite and jadeite in the Alps, but merely under condi- tions which render it highly improbable that the extensive territories where such hatchets are found should have derived them from there. We may rather presume with certainty that at least a great part of the hatchets mentioned have been imported by commerce from the Orient,2 whence the knowledge of polishing hatchets is derived. At a somewhat later time, an extensive trade in stone artefacts was carried on within the boundaries of Europe." The naturalists have had their say in the matter, but the historian is entitled to push his reflections farther on. Further investigations will be required for a satisfactory solution of all questions bearing on the dissemination of jade implements. The origin, e. g., of the jade hatchets unearthed by Schliemann in the oldest walled city at Hissarlik has, to my knowledge, not yet been determined. I certainly admit that the question in its widest range as raised by Fischer has been settled, but there are still other sides to it calling for attention. 1 Petrographische Untersuchungen von Steinwerkzeugen und ihrer Rohmateria- lien aus Schweizerischen Pfahlbaustatten (Neues Jahrbuchfur Mineralogie, Vol. XVI, 1903, p. 166). 2 Compare article by C. Mehlis, Exotische Steinbeile (Archiv fur Anthropologic, Vol. XXVII, 1902, No. 4, pp. 599-611). 4 Introduction. If we consider how many years, and what strenuous efforts it required for European scientists to discover the actual sites of jade in central Europe, which is geographically so well explored, we may realize that it could not have been quite such an easy task .for primitive man to hunt up these hidden places, even granted that geological conditions may then have been different or more favorable. Or was that primi- tive man so much keener and more resourceful than our present scien- tists? Or if not, we must grant him the same difficulties in the search for jade as to them. And if he overcame these difficulties and after all found jade, it seems to me that he must have been prompted by a motive pre-existing and acting in his mind; the impetus of searching for jade, he must have received somehow and from somewhere, in the same manner as was the case with our modern scientists who, without the nephrite question in their heads, would not have searched for it, and who finally found it, only because they sought it. This is the psychological side of the historical aspect of the problem. Why did the Romans discover the Terra Sigillata on the Rhine and in other parts of Germany unknown to the indigenous population? Because they were familiar with this peculiar clay from their Mediter- ranean homes, because they prized this pottery highly and desired it in their new home. Let us suppose that we should not possess any records relating to the history of porcelain. The chief substance of which it is made, kaolin, is now found in this country, in Germany, Holland, France and England, all of which produce objects of porcelain; con- sequently, porcelain is indigenous to Europe and America, because the material is found there. By a lucky chance of history we know that it was made in neither country before the beginning of the eight- eenth century, and that the incentive received from China was the stimulus to Boettger's rediscovery in Dresden. Of course, arguing a priori, the peoples of Europe and America could have made porcelain ages ago; the material was at their elbows, but the brutal fact remains that they did not, that they missed the opportunity, and that only the importation and investigation of Chinese porcelain were instru- mental in hunting for and finding kaolinic clay. And, while there have been porcelains produced by local industry in Europe and America for the last two centuries, we have, side by side with them, numerous direct imports from China which continue despite the output of the home market. Similar conditions may have prevailed also in an early stage of the history of Europe. Even if jade occurs there in a natural state in several localities, even if there is conclusive proof that it was dug and worked in various areas, we are entitled to question, — did the idea Introduction. 5 of searching for jade, working it and valuing it so highly, originate independently in all these quarters? Is it not possible, at least the- oretically, that such an idea once arising was diffused from tribe to tribe or group to group, as the agency in the search for the prized material? Even in the present state of the question, it cannot be denied that the possibilities of a trade in jade pieces existed, as sug- gested by O. Montelius and Sophus Muller, whom Herman Hirt (Die Indogermanen, Vol. I, p. 317, Strassburg, 1905) joins in their view, as the sources from which they are derived are restricted to a few localities. Such a commerce in Europe was an easy transaction, if compared with the striking parallel in Asia moving on a much larger scale. For the last two millenniums, Turkistan has furnished to China the greater supply of her jade, wrought and unwrought, and the most colossal bowlders of the mineral were constantly transported from Khotan to Si-ngan fu and Peking over a trade-route unparalleled in extent and arduousness in Europe and requiring a four to six months' journey. There is, further, the example of the lively trade in jadeite from Burma overland into Yunnan Province, and the transportation of jeweled nephrite objects from India into China in the eighteenth century. These are all achievements of commerce and transportation compared to which the difficulties in the limited area of Europe dwindle into a nothingness. If bronze was bartered from the Orient into the northernmost part of Europe, if Prussian amber found its way to Italy, Greece and anterior Asia, and if obsidian was everywhere propagated by trade (Sophus Muller, /. c, p. 48; R. Dussaud, Les civilisations prehelleniques, p. 77), it is reasonable and logical to conclude that the same opportunities were open to jade. Nothing could induce me to the belief that primitive man of central Europe incidentally and spontaneously embarked on the laborious task of quarrying and working jade. The psychological motive for this act must be supplied, and it can be deduced only from the source of his- torical facts. From the standpoint of the general development of culture in the Old World, there is absolutely no vestige of originality in the prehistoric cultures of Europe which appear as an appendix to Asia. Originality is certainly the rarest thing in this world, and in the history of mankind the original thoughts are appallingly sparse. There is, in the light of historical facts and experiences, no reason to credit the prehistoric and early historic populations of Europe with any spontaneous ideas relative to jade; they received these, as every- thing else, from an outside source ; they gradually learned to appreciate the value of this tough and compact substance, and then set to hunting for natural supplies. 6 Introduction. The most extensive collection of jades in existence is the Heber R. Bishop collection, the greater part of which is now on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The object of this collection is universal and includes specimens of jades from all countries and ages. It is exceedingly rich in magnificent objects of Chinese art, of intrinsic value from an artistic point of view. The collection of Chinese jades which I had the opportunity to make for the Field Museum in Si-ngan fu, Shensi Province, on two occasions in 1909 and 19 10, is chiefly gathered from an archaeological standpoint to illustrate an important phase in the ancient culture-life of China, and represents by no means a duplicate parallel to the Bishop collection, as it includes a great deal of material which does not exist in the latter. Also in the de- partment of eighteenth century jades, there is a marked difference between the Mrs. Blackstone and the Bishop collections, as pointed out here in the concluding chapter. Mr. Bishop's Chinese specimens of jade, I understand, were mostly procured in Peking or Shanghai, where the gorgeous modern art -work prevails. The greater opportu- nity for objects of archaeological interest is afforded in Si-ngan fu, the centre of the old civilization where numerous primitive specimens are exhumed from the graves of the Chou and Han periods, and where the best private jade collections of Chinese connoisseurs exist. I had the good fortune to receive valuable instruction there from an expert scholar who had spent almost a life-time on the study of mortuary jades and other antiquities, and whose extensive collections, partly the fruit of his own excavations, were gradually acquired by me. The interesting jade amulets of the dead, chiefly derived from his collection, are here published for the first time with his explanations, nor have they ever been described before in any Chinese book. None of these types are in the Bishop collection. For this and other reasons, the two are not rival collections, but supplement each other in many respects. The description of the Bishop collection appeared in two volumes under the title "Investigations and Studies in Jade," New York, privately printed, 1906. The preface of Heber R. Bishop is dated June, 1902.1 The collection is stated there to number nine hundred specimens, which are catalogued under the three headings mineralogical, archaeological, and art objects. Nearly two hundred pieces were presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Vol. I (277 pages) consists of five parts. Part I contains a general intro- duction with a survey of the nephrite question. Part II, entitled 1 He died in December of the same year. A sketch of his life and aspirations written by G. F. Kunz will be found in American Anthropologist, 1903, pp. 111-117. Introduction. 7 "Jade in China," is elaborated by S. W. Bushell. Mr. Bishop re- quested "a condensed article on jade by a native Chinese scholar, treating upon its uses in China from the earliest period down to the present day." Accordingly, Dr. Bushell commissioned a scholar, T'ang Jung-tso by name, to write such an essay, the text of which is reproduced in facsimile and provided with a translation by Bushell. This document is composed of a conglomeration of literary quotations from ancient texts which are rather inexactly and sometimes incom- pletely cited. Dr. Bushell did not verify them from the originals, and it is hard to see why a Chinese scholar of his standing agreed to such a procedure, as he certainly knew that the Chinese cyclopaedias, above all the T'u shu tsi ch'eng, contain the completest possible col- lections of notes on jade. I do not see much sensible exposition of the subject of jade from the Chinese standpoint in T'ang Jung-tso's essay, which, though undeniably comprising a number of useful extracts, lacks intelligent understanding. Another Chinese article written by Li Shih-ch'uan and illustrated with sketches depicting the various stages in the modern manufacture of jade is very instructive. Part III, "Jade as a Mineral," edited by G. F. Kunz, presents the most complete and thorough investigation of this subject carried on by a whole staff of specialists. The questions treated in detail in this section are the colors of jade, whether natural or the result of weathering or staining; the translucency, lustre, opalescence, sheen, and other qualities; the tenacity of jade; its resonant quality which makes it valued by the Chinese as a material for musical instruments; the relative hardness and specific gravity of nephrite and jadeite, their different chemical constitution, and the localities of their occurrence. Part IV is devoted to a sketch of the methods of working jade. Part V, "Worked Jade," is intended to give a general summary of this subject under two headings, "Prehistoric" and "Historic." Vol. II (293 pages) contains the descriptive cata- logue of the collection. Dr. Bushell has bestowed great pains in fully describing the Chinese portion of it and explaining with careful exactness the ornamentation and inscriptions displayed on the fine Chinese specimens in which the collection abounds. Mr. Bishop expressed in the preface the hope that his book might be found to be of some value as a book of reference. His work is doubtless one of the most beautiful and sumptuous books ever published in this country, but it is a matter for profound regret that its valuable contents is practically lost to science, owing to its unwieldy size and weight (one hundred and twenty-five pounds) and its distribution in only ninety- eight copies, none of which have been sold, but which have all been 8 Introduction. presented to libraries, museums, and it is said, "to the crowned heads and other great rulers of the world." It would be desirable that the main bulk of the work might be republished in a convenient edition for wider circulation. As the collection of Chinese jades in the Field Museum was made by me from another point of view than is the Bishop collection in New York, so the contents of this study is plainly distinct from the monumental work of Mr. Bishop. The subjects treated there have not been repeated here. The methods of working jade and the trade in jade from Turkistan and Burma to China are not discussed, as Dr. Bushell has thoroughly canvassed this ground. He has also worked up a map showing the jade-producing districts of Turkistan. New as the subject matter of this publication is, aside from the concluding chapter, which was necessary in order to trace the development of jade works down to the present time, so also is the presentation of the subject itself which is based on archaeological methods. I have en- deavored to furnish a piece of research- work in which jade is to yield the material to delineate cultural and chiefly religious developments in ancient China. I do not mean to deal with jade for its own sake, but as a means to a certain end; it merely forms the background, the leading motive, for the exposition of some fundamental ideas of Chinese religious concept which find their most characteristic expression and illustration in objects of jade. To trace their relation to thought was therefore my chief aim, and hence the result has rather become a contribution to the psychology of the Chinese. A consideration of the Chinese sources utilized will give also occa- sion to speak on the methods pursued by me and some of the general results of the work. Antiquities of jade have been treated by the Chinese in the following special works : i. K'ao ku t'u, "Investigations of Antiquities with Illustrations," by Lu Ta-lin, in ten chapters, first published during the Sung dynasty in 1092, and re-edited by Huang Sh&ng in 1753 as an appendix to Wang Fu's Po ku t'u. In Chapter 8, a small collection of jades in the possession of Li Po-shih from Lu-kiang is figured, but without in- vestigation. 2. Ku yii t'u, "Ancient Jades Illustrated," by Chu T£h-jun, in two chapters, published 1341, and republished in 1753 with the edition of the Po ku t'u mentioned. The explanations appended to the illus- trations are meagre; several of them have been reproduced in this paper. 3. Ku yii t'u p'u, "Illustrated Description of Ancient Jades" in 100 chapters, being the collection of jade belonging to the first emperor Introduction. 9 of the Southern Sung dynasty, Kao-tsung (11 27-1 162 a. d.) and con- sisting of over seven hundred pieces, prepared by a commission of nineteen, including one writer and four artists,1 headed by Lung Ta- yuan, president of the Board of Rites (Li pu) who also prefaced the work in 11 76. Dr. Bushell, who has devoted a careful study to this book, gives also a translation of this preface (Bishop, Vol. I, p. 32). The second preface {Ibid., p. 33) by Kiang Ch'un, dated 1779, relates how "a manuscript copy of the book had been purchased in 1773, when the Emperor had issued a decree to search throughout the empire for lost books, and a copy sent to be examined by the library commission then sitting. This year I again read through the original manuscript and found the description clearly written and the illustrations cleverly executed, so that it was worthy of being compared with the Siian ho Po ku t'u. This book describes the ancient bronzes referred to in the Chou li, while our work describes the jade, so that we could not spare either. The Po ku t'u was reprinted several times and gained a wide circulation, while this book remained in manuscript2 and attracted no notice, not being included in the Catalogue of Literature of the Sung History, nor quoted by older writers. Lung Ta-yiian, whose name is included in the chapter on Imperial Sycophants of the Sung History, died before the date of publication, but he is left at the head of the commission, in memory of the work done by him. His actions were not worthy, but that is no reason for suppressing his book. I venture to bring this book before the eye of the Emperor, that it may again be referred to the library committee for revision and be corrected by them, and have the honor of being reprinted under special imperial authority." The verdict of the Library Committee seems to have been unsatis- factory, continues Dr. Bushell, for they criticize the book most severely in the Imperial Catalogue (Se ku ts'iian shu tsung mu, Ch. 116, pp. 7-9) on account of there being no references to it in later books, and of certain anachronisms in the list of members of the commission, and declare it finally to be a fraud, and not even a clever one; without any examination, however, of the contents — as Bushell adds, which could have hardly been the case. 1 Liu Sung-nien, Li T'ang, Ma Yuan, and Hia Kuei. It was their task to reproduce the jade pieces in colors for the one original copy to be dedicated to the emperor. *It has been said that the Ku yii t'u p'u was published in 11 76 and republished in 1779 (Hirth, T'oung Pao, Vol. VII, p. 500, and The Ancient History of China, p. 89). It is of importance to note that 1779 is the date of the first publication, and that the work was allowed to remain in manuscript up to that time, i. e. over 600 years. The original manuscript was then lost, and we have no means of judging in how far, or how correctly the illustrations of the original have been preserved in the printed edition. io Introduction. If it is too much to say that the whole work is a fraud, I quite agree with this criticism in that it contains a great deal of purely fictitious matter. Fictitious are, in my opinion, all the ancient inscriptions alleged to be inscribed on the jades which have never existed in ancient times and are simply the invention of the T'ang or Sung periods.1 Even Dr. Bushell, who evinces confidence in this work, admits that there are many tablets figured in it which have little pretension to the great antiquity assigned to them, and that some of the inscriptions are evidently copied from pieces of ancient bronze figured in archaeological books, and that, in fact, many of the specimens in the later parts of the collection seem to be derived from a similar source — the fountain- head of almost all Chinese decorative art. It is also suspicious that many pieces, e. g., all the tablets of rank in the first chapter ascribed to the Hia dynasty, have been inscribed on the back as having belonged to the T'ang and Southern T'ang dynasties. The work opens with two oblong jade tablets ascribed to the myth- ical emperor Yu from the supposed resemblance of the two undeciphered characters on the upper side with the so-called tadpole characters on the alleged inscription of Yii (Kou lou pei). On the back, we find an inscription reading "Dark-colored tablet (kuei) of Yu the sovereign who regulated the waters. Collection of the Imperial Treasury of the period K'ai yuan (713-741 a. d.) of the Great T'ang dynasty." The Sung authors tell us that these two pieces came to light in the period Chih ho (1054-55), in the river Ts'i when its waters were dried up, and that these were both found inside of large bronze kettles {ting) each weighing over a hundred catties; the walls of these urns were covered with inscriptions identical in character with those on the tablets. The Sung authors suppose that they had been thrown into the river during the T'ang dynasty as an offering to the river-god, to restore the river to normal conditions. But would genuine relics of the Hia dynasty have been used for this purpose? It seems rather plausible that these two alleged tablets of Yu were fabricated at the time of the T'ang dynasty, possibly with the idea of serving as offerings to a river-god.2 The name of Yu as the ruler of water was inscriptions, particularly those containing dates, on jade pieces are suspicious in any case. In the best archaeological collection of jades, that of Wu Ta-ch'eng (see below), there is among two hundred and fifteen ancient pieces, not one inscribed, nor is there one in my collection. A few pieces in the Bishop collection with alleged Han inscriptions are, for this and also for other reasons, highly suspicious. The dating of jade objects became a fashion only in the K'ien-lung period. 2 Also Wu Ta-ch'£ng (see below under 5) states in the preface of his work that under the T'ang and Sung many imitations of jade objects were made which can hardly be distinguished from the ancient genuine ones. The same author's judg- ment on the Ku yu t'u p'u is: "Its drawback consists in the indiscriminate choice of a confused mass of objects, nor does it betray intelligence." Introduction. i i appropriately chosen for such a purpose, and the two characters were modeled after the curious style of that doubtless ancient inscription which a later age has associated without foundation with the name of Yii. It goes without saying that at the time of Yii, if such a per- sonage ever existed, jade tablets of this type had not yet made their debut, for these were purely a creation of the official hierarchy of the Chou dynasty. Thus, it is likewise a legendary anachronism, if the Shu king (Ch. Shun tien, 7) and Se-ma Ts'ien (Chavannes, Vol. I, p. 61) ascribe the five insignia of rank (wu jui) to the mythical emperor Shun, as these are connected with the five feudal princes and the whole system of feudalism and investiture of the Chou period; and Cha- vannes is certainly right in saying that this consideration demonstrates the legendary character of the accounts relative to Shun. There is, further, no ancient text describing a jade tablet of the type here referred to, and if it were by any means an object really going back to times of great antiquity, it would be incredible that the T'ang people should have been so idiotic as to fling such a precious relic down to the bottom of a river. The entire story of the Sung authors, gifted with a lively imagination, is open to grave doubt and suspicion, and may, after all, be a concoction made up by them ad hoc. It does not betray much critical acumen on their part to make these two pieces contemporaneous with Yu.1 Our confidence in this production is not increased by considering the two following jade tablets also very generously attributed to the Emperor Yii. The former of these is adorned with ten unexplained and unexplainable characters shaped into strange figures of* insects, fish, and birds; on the back, there is an inscription (in li shu) calling this specimen "a tablet with seal-characters of Yii" {Yii chuan kuei) and giving the period Sheng yiian (937-942 a. d.) of the Nan T'ang (reign of Li King). Nevertheless, we are assured that the writing of Yu cannot be doubted. The latter Yu tablet is provided with ten seal characters, and the same inscription on the reverse as the preceding one. Then we advance to a tablet with twenty-one characters of a different style, said to resemble those on the bells of the Shang dynasty, while the reverse is adorned with the sentence: "Jade tablet of pros- perity of the rulers of the Shang." Three more Shang tablets follow, marked on the reverse as "preserved in the treasury of the period T'ai ts'ing of the Liang dynasty" (Wu ti, 547-550 a. d.). These alleged Shang tablets are just as fictitious as those of Yu ; tablets of this kind did not exist under the Shang, and if they had existed, would not have been 1 One of these is figured in Conrady's China (Pflugk-Harttung's Weltgeschichte, p. 528). 12 Introduction. engraved with inscriptions in general nor with these particular in- scriptions, as also the kuei of the Chou dynasty were never provided with them. Curiously enough, the number of Yii tablets is four, and the same number applies to the Shang tablets; there is also numerical systematization in forgery. The Chinese epigraphists have justly passed these inscriptions over with silence, and I am not aware that any one of the numerous Chinese works on inscriptions and ancient characters has ever availed itself of the services of the Ku yii Vu p'u. It is unnecessary to con- tinue this criticism, as we shall have ample occasion to come back to this work in dealing with the single types of ancient jades. While it is entirely untrustworthy for archaeological studies, it has a certain value in presenting a grammar of ornaments and giving the names for these, as they were current in the Sung period. We shall see in the course of this investigation that many of these designs are strongly influenced or even directly created by the pictorial style of the Sung artists, and that they represent a more interesting contribution to the art of the Sung than to any former period. This case will also sufficiently show how much criticism is required for judging a Chinese illustration of an ancient art -work, which should not be utilized before its sources and merits are critically examined and ascertained. Also he only can use it who has seen and handled actual specimens of an identical or similar type; the imperfection and inac- curacy of Chinese drawings will always lead astray one who- has missed those opportunities. The favorite method of culling engravings of bronzes from Chinese books and building far-reaching conclusions on this material as to the development of ornamentation cannot be accepted and will always lead to grave disappointments in the end. 4. Tsi ku yii Vu, "Collection of Ancient Jades with Illustrations, " a small work published in 1341 during the Yuan period. In all prob- ability, this book is now lost; it is quoted occasionally in the San ts'ai Vu hui, published in 1607. 5. The most recent and valuable Chinese contribution to the study of antique jades is entitled Ku yii Vu k'ao, "Investigations into Ancient Jades with Illustrations," in two quarto-volumes published in 1889 by the well known scholar and statesman, Wu Ta-ch'&ng,1 who was born in Su-chou in 1833. He graduated as tsin shih in 1868 and became a member of the Han-lin College. In 1884 he went to Corea as Commissioner, then served as Governor of Kuang-tung Province and, appointed subsequently Governor of Hunan, made a vain attempt to introduce the telegraph there. In 1894 he was ordered 1 His other works are enumerated by Paul Pelliot, T'oung Pao, 191 1, p. 448. Introduction. 13 to Tientsin to assist Li Hung-chang against the Japanese; his efforts, however, were not rewarded with success, and he has since been living in retirement; he is said to be an enlightened man and well-disposed towards Europeans.1 In his work on jades, two hundred and fifteen pieces are illustrated in outline, as a rule reduced to seven-tenths of their original size, described as to their coloring, identified with their ancient names and explained with quotations from ancient literature, among which Chou li, Li ki, Shi king, Tso chuan and the dictionary Shuo win are conspicuous. The text is a facsimile reprint of Wu's own expressive and energetic handwriting. The engravings in his work are far above the average of similar accomplishments of the Chinese and executed with care and in good proportionate measure- ments. As most of these jade objects and their designs are flat, the Chinese draughtsman had a much easier task with them than he encounters, e. g., with bronze vessels; Chinese art is one of linear designs in which it excels, while objects of bodily dimensions are always apt to be misdrawn to a certain extent. I was forced to reproduce the material of Wu almost in its entirety, owing to its great archaeological importance.2 It will be noticed at a glance how widely different this material is from that published in the former Chinese works. All his ancient specimens have a spontaneously archaic character. It is a truly archaeological collection, explained with great erudition and acumen, and reflects the highest credit on the modern school of Chinese archaeologists. Wu Ta-ch'eng is not bound by the fetters of the past and not hampered by the accepted school-traditions. With fair and open mind, he criticizes the errors of the commentators to the Chou lit the Ku yii t'u p'u and many others, and his common sense leads him to new and remarkable results not anticipated by any of his predecessors. Because my own collection is a counterpart of his, being made from an archaeological, not an artistic point of view, I could choose no better guide for the interpretation of this collection than him; I have fol- lowed him with keen admiration and stand to him in the relation of a disciple to his master. If I have been able to write the chapters on the jade symbols of sovereign power and the jade images of the cosmic deities, my lasting thanks and acknowledgments are due to this great scholar whose ingenious investigations have furnished the basis for this research; but for his efforts it would have been impossible to attack these complicated problems with any chance for success. 1 After Giles, Chinese Biographical Dictionary, p. 889. 2 All text-figures where no special source is indicated are derived from the book of Wu. 14 Introduction. Only a few among us at present have an idea of the extent and depth of fruitful archaeological work now carried on by Chinese scholars. The opinion still largely prevails in our circles that the whole archaeol- ogical Chinese wisdom is bound up with the Sung catalogues of the Po ku Vu and Ku yii Vu p'u, to which the superficial Si ts'ing ku kien and the brilliant Kin-shih so are possibly added. But there are many dozens of modern well illustrated catalogues of bronzes and other antiquities accompanied by keen and clever disquisitions which do not shun discrediting or even refuting the worn-out statements of the Po ku Vu. It has been almost entirely overlooked in Europe that the latter work, however valuable it may be in many respects, presents nothing but the traditions of the Sung period relative to objects of the Chou and Han periods; it must be thoroughly examined in each and every case in how far those claims are founded, in how far they agree or disagree with the traditions handed down in the contem- poraneous texts of antiquity, and in how far they may be biased by the peculiar conditions of art and artists obtaining under the Sung dynasty. The so-called monster Vao-Vieh certainly existed as a decora- tive design on bronze vases of the Chou; but whether in all cases, when the Po ku Vu points this design out on Chou bronzes, it is really in- tended in the minds of the Chou artists is another question which requires special critical examination; for there are many designs of other conventional monsters on those ancient bronzes. To cite only one example as to how far modern Chinese archaeol- ogists go in contradicting the old, beloved school opinions, there is now the unanimous opinion in China and Japan that the so-called metal mirrors with designs of grapes, birds, lions and horses cannot come down from the time of the Han dynasty, as asserted by the Po ku Vu without the shadow of an evidence ; they originated shortly before the T'ang dynasty, probably in the fifth and sixth centuries, and I may add, under Persian influence, as indeed the composition of this pattern first appears in the Sassanidian art of Persia, but never in Greek art as hitherto believed in Europe. For all serious future investigations into Chinese antiquities, it will be incumbent on us to pay due attention to the works, opinions and results also of modern Chinese (as well as Japanese) archaeologists. The time has gone when only the Po ku Vu and the very weak Si ts'ing ku kien, which is of small value, may be ransacked at random and haphazardly by the foreign inquirer. Studies exclusively based on such books, without regard to the world of reality, deserve, in my opinion, no acknowledgment and are prac- tically worthless. Aside from these monographs, there are numerous other books Introduction. 15 devoting a chapter or two to art-works of jade and cyclopaedias giving extracts and quotations on the subject. The Ko ku yao lun by Ts'ao Chao, published in 1387, and the Po wu yao Ian by Ku Ying-t'ai, published between 162 1 and 1627, are especially noteworthy. The great cyclopaedia T'u shu tsi ch'eng of 1726, a copy of which is in the John Crerar Library (C 750), contains eight chapters on jade in its section on National Economy, Ch. 325-332. There is also a great amount of useful information in the Yen kien lei han (Original Palace edition of 1710 in 140 Vols, in the Newberry Library, N 36), Ko chih king yiian published in 1735 by Ch'en Yuan-lung (1652-1736), Pen ts'ao kang mu by Li Shih-chen (completed in 1578), and certainly in the P'ei wen yiin fu (Ch. 100 a). To enumerate all Chinese sources is unnecessary, since the sinological reader knows where to turn, while no advantage would accrue from such a task to the general reader. As our collection relates to the cultural conditions of antiquity, we are certainly obliged to consult the ancient texts in which its ideas arc reflected. The classical Book of Songs (Shi king) and the Book of History (Shu king) are prominent among these. The principal sources bearing on the ancient religious cult and containing ample material on the ceremonial usage of jade are the three great Rituals, the Chou It, the Li ki, and the / li.1 Of the former, we possess the excellent translation by Edouard Biot2 which is a monument of stupendous and sagacious erudition and remains the only work of Chinese literature heretofore translated into any foreign language with a complete rendering of all commentaries. In a great number of passages, I was prevented from following any of the ac- cepted translations, especially in those cases where archaeological objects and questions are involved. If it is true that Chinese archae- ology must be based on the knowledge of Chinese texts with the same method as classical archaeology, it is no less true that the interpretation of the ancient texts will have a great deal to learn from the facts of archaeological research and its living objects of stone, clay or metal which are harder than any paper-transmitted evidence. In the light of revived antiquity, we shall learn better to understand and appreciate the ancient Rituals in particular. If I am obliged, most reluctantly, to deviate from such authorities as Biot, Legge and Couvreur, I beg my critics not to interpret this necessity as arrogance or a mania for 1 1 availed myself of the Palace Edition published 1748 by order of the Emperor K*ien-lung in 182 Vols. (John Crerar Library, Nos. 213-215). As to the illustrations, I did not always quote them from this edition, which but few readers may have at their disposal, but rather from current European books easily accessible to every one. 2 See Bibliography at end. 16 Introduction. knowing better on my part, but as a suggestion intimated by a con- sideration of the new material here offered. This advance in our knowledge is riot my merit, but merely the consequence of favorable opportunities granted me by a fortunate chance. I cannot dwell here on a literary discussion of the three Rituals. It is well known that the Chou li was not put together until under the Han dynasty; never- theless, it reflects the peculiar culture of the Chou period in such a complete and systematic manner as could have only been written at that time. It is a state handbook expounding in minutest detail the complex organism of the governmental institutes of the Chou emperors. There is no doubt that the book has been touched and worked over, perhaps also interpolated as the Li ki, under the Han editorship; but substantially and virtually, it is the property of the Chou time.1 The Han commentators were no more able to explain intelligently many passages in it, as the culture of the Chou had perished before the hatred and persecution of the Ts'in, and, as we now see to our great surprise, interpreted quite wrongly most of the ceremonial utensils of the Chou, which were no longer within the reach of their vision. Here we must briefly touch one of the curious results of the follow- ing investigation which will interest sinologues and archaeologists alike. It seems that the Chinese commentators attempted to render an account of the appearance of ceremonial and other antiquarian objects either on the ground of oral traditions, or from hearsay, or, in the majority of cases, on reconstructions evolved from their own minds; but their comments are not based on a real viewing of the objects concerned. This state of affairs is easily evidenced in general by a glance at the so-called Illustrations to the Rituals, as the San li Vu of Nieh Tsung-i of the Sung period (962 a. d.), or the illustrated vol- umes of the K'ien-lung edition, which pretend to picture all objects of importance mentioned in the ancient texts. It was always a source of wonder to me how the Chinese got hold of these weak drawings which bear the indelible stamp of unreality and depict many objects as, e. g., weapons, carriages and houses, in a way which we must decry as utterly impossible from a purely technical viewpoint; and there is likewise reason to wonder that such figures could find their way into foreign books (Biot, Pauthier, Zottoli, Legge, Couvreur) to illus- trate ancient Chinese culture, and be passed as the real thing without a word of comment or criticism. A comparison of these reconstructive or purely imaginary pictures with the actual specimens of the Chou 1 Edkins's criticism of the Chou li in his paper Ancient Navigation in the Indian Ocean (Journal R. Asiatic Society, Vol. XVIII, p. 19) deserves special attention. Introduction. 17 period now at our disposal will show that, in the plurality of cases, there is hardly a shadow of resemblance between the two. Wu Ta- ch'£ng has taken the lead in this new field of research, and we are indebted to him for the restoration of the truth in the place of roman- ticism with regard to archaeological objects of primary importance. The image of the Deity Earth has been mistaken for the part of a chariot wheel-nave which never existed in this form, while the former was construed in the shape of an eight-pointed star-figure, going back to a misunderstanding read by the commentators into their texts. The most instructive examples of this kind are the ku pi and p'u pi, i. e. jade disks with "grain" and "rush" pattern. The ancient Chinese texts are clad in a brief and laconic style, never wasting a word on the description of objects then known to everybody. They simply give the names of numerous vases, weapons, insignia, etc., without further details, so that there is plenty of room for the commentators to expand. These were scholars alien to the world, of versatile intuition perhaps, but lacking in the knowledge and observation of life and reality. It was not found unreasonable to answer that the jade disks ku had a bunch of cereals, and those called p'u a design of rushes engraved on them; the Sung artists ac- cepted this comment, and quite characteristic of the pictorial tendency of their time, reconstructed those disks by drawings with realistic representations of the respective plants. For two thousand years, the Chinese have groped absolutely in the dark as regards the true nature of these disks. Now we know that such designs never existed in the Chou period, that the disks ku were covered with concentric" rows of raised dots, an ornament called "grain," and that the disks p'u were decorated with a mat impression consisting of hexagons, the pattern receiving its name from a rush-mat. This and many other examples revealed on the pages to follow will furnish much food for reflection. First, in regard to the methods of the archaeologist. A net distinc- tion should always be made between the wording of the ancient texts and the additional utterances of commentatorial wisdom. The com- mentators, very often, may certainly be right and reasonable, but should be held up as suspects under all circumstances and acquitted only on close trial. Their thoughts are usually afterthoughts, re- flections, adjustments, compromises, evasions. It all depends upon the length of time by which the editor is separated from the time of the original. The singular world of the Chou was shattered in the period of the Han, and the Han scholars knew little in fact about that bygone age. Chinese later illustrations to the classics can be 18 Introduction. consulted and utilized only after a most painful scrutiny of the subject in question, and in almost all cases, they will then be found worthless because fanciful. The sinologue is confronted with this problem, — is the Chinese language really that clear and logical structure such as has been given out by a certain school of philologists, if the Chinese themselves, and even their best' scholars of the remote Han period, were liable to misunderstand their ancient classical texts step for step? And what is the cause for these misunderstandings? To one initiated into the ethnological mode of thinking, it is not far to seek. Indeed, it would be unjust to brand the Chinese with special reproach in this matter, and to expose their working-methods to unfair reflec- tions. What developed in China along this line, is a subconscious factor which has dominated the cultural life of all peoples of the globe from the dim beginnings of mankind until the present day. It is the pre- vailing tendency of the human mind to account for the reason of existing customs and traditions, and to seek, with the advance of individual conscious reasoning, for rational explanations of phenomena purely emotional and ethnical at the outset. This method results in a new association of ideas which has nothing in common with the origin of the notion in question, and may be the outcome of pure, speculation. In China, where the bent to systematizing speculation was always strong in the minds of individual thinkers, the effects of this mental process come more intensely to the surface than in smaller communities more strongly tied by a uniformity of tribal thoughts, and for this reason, the Chinese offer the best imaginable material for a study of the psychological foundations of ethnical phenomena. The errors in the interpretation of ancient customs and notions committed by Chinese commentators and editors, their failures in their attempts at a reconstruction of the past, and their positive pro- ductions of newly formed ancient artistic designs, never existing in times of antiquity, are not logical blunders to be imputed to their intellectual frame, but emanations of their psychical constitution evolved from a new process of association. The problem moves on purely psychological, not on mental lines. To revert to our above example, — the trend of thought in the Chou time was symbolic, swayed by impressions and sentiments received from celestial and cosmical aspects of the universe, and strove for expression in geo- metrical representations, so much so that the singular art of the Chou cannot be better characterized than by the two words symbolic and geometric, or, as geometric symbolism. Round raised dots or knobs were suggestive, on mere emotional grounds, of a heap of grain-seeds. Introduction. 19 This mode of observation became foreign to subsequent generations who, reflecting upon the peculiar traits of the Chou culture, could but realize that a real representation of grain in the manner of a living plant was intended. The Sung artists with their inspirations for naturalistic designs took possession of this notion and instilled it with life by sketching it on paper. Thus, they transformed a rational reflection by mere intuition into a permanent motive of art promul- gated as the production of the Chou period. This case is by no means unique, but it is due to such misinterpreta- tions, reflections and afterthoughts that many hundreds of artistic motives (and certainly not only these, but also customs, habits, tradi- tions, social conventions, moral principles, etc.) have arisen everywhere among mankind. But, whereas in other cultures it is not always easy to unravel the mystery of this development, the long history of China and the vast stores of her literary and artistic wealth will often allow us to peep behind the stage, and to grasp the human and psychic force of such transformations of thought. It must therefore remain one of our principal endeavors, in the treatment of Chinese archae- ological subjects, to penetrate into the psychical basis of motives, — not only because this procedure will simultaneously furnish most valuable contributions to the psychology of the Chinese, which is much needed, but also in order to attain to a correct understanding of the history of the motive itself, since otherwise our knowledge would be an utter fallacy and self-deception. We must grasp the nature-loving spirit of the impressionistic Sung artists to appreciate their very neat naturalistic designs of cereals and rushes on the Chou disks of jade. And we must understand, on the other hand, the complex organism of the world and life conception of the Chou period, which is quite a distinct and peculiar China in itself, to be prompted to the conclusion that the Chou design proposed by the intuition of the Sung artists cannot possibly have been an inherit- ance of the Chou. Then we must realize how the gigantic power of the superman Ts'in Shih Huang-ti had broken the ritualistic culture of the Chou, how a few remains and ruins of it only were exhumed and aired again by the revival activity of the Han, a movement of great earnestness and deep honesty of intention. Thus, we gain a basis for a judgment of the thinking and doings of the Han and later com- mentators, on whose shoulders the art -historians, art-critics and compilers of art -catalogues of the Sung period stand. By thus joining link for link in this long chain and carefully listen- ing to each tradition, wc may finally hope to learn something of the development of Chinese ideas and art. Certainly, if handled by this 20 Introduction. analytic method, Chinese archaeology and art -history is not so easy as it may appear to the outsider from some popular books and light essays to which the public has been treated in recent years by authors who, light-minded, take everything in a storm, because they are unable to recognize the complexity and weight of a problem. "To sit on the bottom of a well, and to say that Heaven is small," curtly remarks a Chinese proverb. I utterly fail to see of what avail it is to us to build the roof before the ground-pillars, of what advantage all these discussions on subjective evolutions of motives, on analysis of style and esthetics of Chinese art will be in the long run, as long as we do not know the solid basis, the meaning and history of these motives, and as long as such phantoms will be easily destroyed by every serious investigation. For certainly not by intuition or opinions derived from a general or vague knowledge of art can we hope to reach the goal, but only by the most absorbed method of research consulting the views, traditions and sentiments of those people who created the monuments which we desire to understand. First of all, we must understand the works of Chinese art, before we can judge them, and that is the most difficult side of the question. Certainly, I am not an advocate of seclusion or monopolization. A sound open-door policy in this field carried out in a fair-minded spirit of sympathetic cooperation would be a desirable and refreshing pro- gram which may lead to fruitful results. The field is new and wide, and there is room for many platforms. A sane and whole-hearted exposition of any Chinese subject through an experienced art-student will always be welcome; a fair and impartial criticism or suggestion of an outsider or newcomer to this branch of science may prove as a stimulus to greater efforts. We are all inquirers and seekers for the truth, and everybody has to learn, and everybody is liable to commit errors where the field is virgin. But dictatorial positiveness of judg- ment based on insufficient material and facts is surely detrimental to the good cause. In this paper, antique objects of jade are dealt with in so far as they are living realities, being represented by palpable specimens in Chinese collections or in our own. Numerous jade objects are men- tioned in the ancient texts, none of which, however, have survived. These should be taken up, whenever necessity arises and such objects will actually be discovered. Thus, we hear e. g. of jade and other stone mirrors1 and screens, and even of jade shoes discovered in ancient 1 Stone mirrors were known in ancient Peru, but no specimen exists in any museum. In Yuan y Ulloa's Voyages (Vol. I, p. 482) the following is on record: "Stone mirrors are of two sorts. One of the ' Ynca stone,' the other of the gallinazo stone. The former is not transparent, of a lead color, but soft. They are generally Introduction. 21 graves; but no such specimens have been preserved in any Chinese collections. Siao Tse-hien, the author of the Nan TsH shu ("Annals of the Southern Ts'i dynasty") narrates that in Siang-yang (Hupeh Province) brigands opened an ancient tumulus which according to tradition was that of Chao, king of Ch'u (b. c. 515-489); in the tomb were buried footgear of jade {yii li) and a screen of jade (yii p'ing-feng), the latter being very curious. In another report it is remarked that these jade shoes were the jade clogs of eunuchs (kung jen yii ki), and another tradition in the Ts'i ch'un ts'iu ("Spring and Autumn Annals of Ts'i") has it that people of Siang-yang opened an ancient tumulus, in which there was a jade mirror and ancient records written on bamboo tablets, the characters of which could not be deciphered; only the Buddhist monk K'ien Shan could read them, and it is supposed that this grave is identical with the one mentioned in the "Annals of the Ts'i dynasty."1 The rifling of this tomb may be referred to the year 479 a. d.2 There are also reports on the discovery of cuspidors of jade, one of which was found with two bronze swords and sundry articles of gold and jade in the grave of Siang, king of Wei (b. c. 334-286) .3 Of the interesting jade casks buried with the corpse in the Han period4 to guard the flesh against decay, none has as yet come to light, unfortu- nately, and there are numberless other types of burial jades of which of a circular form and one of the surfaces flat with all the smoothness of a crystal looking glass. The other oval and something spherical, and the polish not so fine. They are of various sizes, but generally 3 or 4 inches in diameter; though I saw one a foot and a half. Its principal surface was concave and greatly enlarged objects, nor could its polish be exceeded by the best workman among us. The gallinazo stone [obsidian?] is very hard, brittle as flint and black color." — Copper mirrors were also used, as reported by Garcilasso de Vega, Royal Commentaries of Peru (Book II, Ch. XVI, 1688, translated by P. Rycaut). "The looking-glasses which the ladies of quality used were made of burnished copper; but the men never used any, for that being esteemed a part of effeminacy, was also a disgrace if not ignominy to them." 1 Ts'i kuo k'ao, Ch. 8, pp. 7b, 8a, 10a. — The TsH kuo k'ao "Investigations into the Seven States" (which are Ts'in, Ts'i, Ch'u, Chao, Han, Wei and Yen) was compiled by Tung Shuo of the Ming dynasty, in fourteen chapters. Reprinted in Vols. 40-41 of the Collection Shou shan ko ts'ung shu. It contains extracts and notes of culture-historical interest regarding these seven feudal principalities. — Compare on the above passage also Hirth, Chinese Metallic Mirrors (Boas Anni- versary Volume, p. 216), and, in regard to another case of the burial of jade mirrors, De Groot, The Religious System of China, Vol. II, p. 414. 2 Compare A. Tschepe, Histoire du royaume de Tch'ou, p. 280 (Shanghai, 1903). 3 De Groot, The Religious System of China, Vol. II, p. 397. 4 They are frequently mentioned in the Annals of the Han Dynasty. Lu Pu- wei, who died in b. c. 235, reports in his book Lu-shih Ch'un Ts'iu: "Pearls are placed in the mouth of the dead, and fish-scales are added; these are now utilized for interment with the dead." The Commentary to this passage remarks: "To place pearls in the mouth of the dead (han chu) means, to fill the mouth with them; the addition of fish-scales means, to enclose these in a jade casket which is placed on the body of the deceased, as if it should be covered with fish-scales." 22 Introduction. we can form no clear idea. In Chinese antiquarian studies, we must always be mindful of the incompleteness and deficiency of material. Only stray fragments and heaps of ruins have been transmitted, while the best and most glorious monuments of the ancient civilization have become the prey of natural decay or wilful destruction. What is preserved is a trifle compared with what is gone. The losses are im- mense and irreparable, and no Varus will ever return us these legions. This consideration should never be lost sight of to guard us against premature conclusions and hasty combinations. Only the most extensive series of types covering wide local and temporal areas will allow us to reach a fairly satisfactory result, and even then reservations must, be made and judgment restricted in view of the thousands- of gaps sadly existing in our knowledge. At the best, we may hope in the end for a reconstruction of the ancient culture-life, as we may piece together and supplement a jar in shreds; sound skepticism will keep from joining the fragments wrongly. The word yii "jade" most frequently occurs in the oldest texts and is said to have been known to the legendary Emperor Huang-ti (alleged b. c. 2704). l The Chinese word is just as general and com- prehensive as our word "jade,"" which may therefore be freely used as its equivalent, and includes nephrite, jadeite, bowenite, sometimes also in ancient pieces special beautiful kinds of serpentine, agalmatolite and marble.2 In the times of antiquity, the number of species and varieties called yii was doubtless much greater than at the present time, as we see from a series of manifold names occurring in the oldest texts (Shi king and Shu king), many of which remain unex- plained. Li Shih-chen, the great Chinese naturalist of the sixteenth century, recognizes fourteen varieties of jade, most of them being dis- tinguished from their colors and localities. At present, it is only nephrite and jadeite that is acknowledged as true jade by the Chinese, all other stones receiving special names. 1 Hirth, The Ancient History of China, pp. 13, 91. 2 It is not correct, as Williams (The Middle Kingdom, Vol. I, p. 309) remarks, that white marble, ruby, and cornelian all come under it. Jade is, as the Chinese say, a species in itself; also agate is considered as sui generis. — It is well known that our word jade is derived from Spanish piedra de hijada, "stone of the loin," because the stone was supposed to cure pain in the loin. Another etymol- ogy is offered by F. Grenakd (Mission scientifique dans la Haute Asie, Vol. II, p. 188) who proposes to derive the word from Turkish yada-tchi, "a sorcerer who is able to produce rain and fine weather by means of a magical stone." Yada is the name of this stone (W. Radloff, Worterbuch der Tiirk-Dialekte, Vol. Ill, Col. 207, 210). It is impossible for two reasons to accept Grenard's suggestion. First, there is no evidence for the word yada to denote jade or exclusively jade, the propar Turkish designation of which is kash (Radloff, Vol. II, Col. 389). Secondly, our word jade is but a recent introduction first brought to England by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) who always uses the Spanish name for the stone in his books; the word does not appear in our literature before this time, as we should expect, if Grenard's surmise were correct. Introduction. 2.5 While from about the Christian era Turkistan became the chief source for the supply of jade to China, to which Yunnan and Burma were later added, neither Turkistan nor Yunnan come into question in very early times. The jades used in the period of the Chou, and most of those of the Han dynasty, were quarried on the very soil of China proper, as we know from the accounts of the Chinese, and as we can still ascertain from the worked jade pieces of those periods which in quality and color are widely different from any produced in Turkistan and Burma. In Bishop's work (Vol. I, p. 9) it is said: "Jade has not yet actually been seen in situ by any competent observer in any of the eighteen provinces of China proper, and it is permissible, meanwhile, to doubt its occurrence and to await more certain evidence. The interior of China is almost unexplored from a geological or mineral- ogical point of view. . . . There may have been ancient quarries which have long since been exhausted ; the material of some of the older carved pieces is certainly different in many respects from anything produced now, and seems to point to lost sources of supply." This supposition is quite correct and is confirmed by the results of many inquiries which I had occasion to make at several times in Si-ngan fu and other places of Shensi Province: all Chinese questioned by me, experts in antiquarian matters, agree in stating that the jades of the Chou and Han dynasties are made of indigenous material once dug on the very soil of Shensi Province, that these quarries have been long ago exhausted, no jade whatever being found there nowadays. My informants pointed to Lan-t'ien and Feng-siang fu as the chief ancient mines. As early as in the Shu king (Tribute of Yu, 19) and in the geography of the Chou li, a trade is mentioned consisting of jade and other minerals in the territory of Yung-chou comprising the northern part of the present province of Shensi between the river Wei in the south and the Ordos region in the north (Hirth, /. c, p. 122). As we now have an opportunity of studying a great number of ancient Chou and Han specimens of jade in the Bishop and Mrs. Blackstone collections, we may now establish the fact with a high degree of certainty that the Chou jades without exception, and the greater part of the Han jades, are made of indigenous material, quarried on the domain of the earliest settlements of the Chinese which they had naturally well explored. This conviction agrees very well with the traditions of the Chinese, as we shall see presently. It requires but little experience and routine work along these lines to distinguish these ancient jades with their salient characteristics of structure and color, and their additional historic qualities acquired in the graves, from the Turkistan and 24 Introduction. Burmese nephrites and jadeites. Their appearance will be described in the following chapters. It was doubtless the Chinese themselves who, being acquainted with jade in their country, probably for mil- lenniums, gave the impetus to the jade fishing and mining industries of Turkistan. Also this case may throw a side-light on the nephrite question of Europe; home-sources do not exclude imports, and scarcity or exhaustion of sources may favor them. The mountains south of Si-ngan fu in Shensi Province produced jade, gold, silver, copper and iron in the first century b. c, as expressly stated in the "Annals of the Former Han Dynasty" (TsHen Han shu) under the reign of Wu-ti; it is mentioned also in the "Biography of Tung-fang So" (see Ta Ts'ing i Vung chi, Ch. 181, p. 14 b). The jade of Lan-t'ien1 enjoyed a special reputation. The distinguished physician T'ao Hung-king (452-536 a. d.), the author of a treatise on Materia medica {Ming i pieh lu), states that the best jade comes from that locality; he mentions also the occurrence of jade in Nan-yang, Honan Province, and in the Lu-jung River of Tonking,2 also that brought from Khotan and Kashgar; if translucent and white as hog's lard, and resonant when struck, it is genuine. In the eleventh century, however, it is positively asserted by Su Sung, an able student of natural science, that in his time no more jade was quarried in those home quarters nor in Tonking, and that it was only found in Khotan. His lifetime may therefore be regarded as the date when the native output of the mineral had come to an end. The high value of the ancient jades is, con- sequently, enhanced considerably by their material no longer existing or being found in its natural state. There are indications that, aside from the Province of Shensi, other localities of jade may have existed or may still exist in China. Mr. Bishop (Vol. I, p. 9) mentions four pebbles procured in Shanghai from a Mohammedan dealer in stones, who said that they were found in the bed of the Liu-yang River in Hunan Province, and which are of interest, as he says, as suggestive of another jade locality in China proper. The Chinese "Gazetteer of Sze-ch'uan Province" (Sze cKuan 1 Lan-t'ien, "the Blue Field," received its name from the jade quarries, as expressly stated in the Chronicle of the place (Lan-t'ien hien chi, Ch. 6, p. 17, edition of 1875). According to T'ao Hung-king, it produced white and green jade. The "Jade Mountain" (Yu shan) was situated 43 li south-east of the town. As an analogy to the exhaustion of the jade mines, the Chronicle quotes the fact that in former times also silver ore (according to the Wei shu), as well as copper and iron were exploited there, all of which no longer occur. An exploration of this site may be recommended to our geographers. 2 According to the Chinese description of Annam, jadeite (fei ts'ui, Deveria's translation jade serpentine is not to the point) is a production of that country (G. Dev£ria, Histoire des Relations de la Chine avec l'Annam, p. 88, Paris. 1880). Introduction. 25 t'ung chi, Ch. 74, p. 43) mentions a "white jade-stone (pai yii shih) resembling jade" produced in the district of Wen-shan in Mou-chou; the natives avail themselves of it to make implements. A variety of green jade called pi (Giles No. 9009) from which arrow-heads can be made is ascribed to the district of Hui-wu or Hui-li in Ning-yiian fu {Ibid., p. 24, and Shu tien, Ch. 8, p. 5). The latter work on Sze-ch'uan (written by Chang Chu-pien in 1818, reprinted 1876) makes mention also of "black jade" ihei yii) after the cyclopaedia T'ai p'ing yii Ian; its color is black like lacquer, and it hence receives also the name "ink jade " (mo yii)1 and ranks low in price. It occurs in western Sze-ch'uan and is identical with the jet or gagate now produced in the district of Kung (in Sii-chou fu), out of which implements are carved. It certainly remains doubtful whether these stones represent real jades, as long as there is no opportunity for identifying specimens of them. According to the "Description" or "Gazetteer of Kansu Province"2 (Ch. 20, p. 7 b), jade is obtained from the river Hung shui pa3 in Su chou. The geographical work Huan yii ki, published by Lo Shi between 976 and 983 a. d., mentions a kind of "brilliant jade" (ming yii) occurring in. Kuang-chou, Ju-ning fu, Honan Province. In Nan-yang Prefecture of the same province, jade may have been dug from the fifth to the eleventh century a. d., as we noticed before. Chinese sources refer to the production of jade in the prefecture of Kuei-lin, Kuang-si Province (G. Deveria, Histoire des Relations de la Chine avec 1'Annam, p. 95, Paris, 1880). But this remains some- what doubtful, as the designation in this case is yii shih, "jade-stone" (instead of yii) which may refer and usually refers to only jade-like stones. Jade seems to have reached China also from the kingdom of the Caliphs. It is reported under the year 716 a. d. that the Emir Sulei- man, who died in 717, sent an ambassador to China to present a robe woven of gold threads (brocade) and a flask of jade ornamented with jewels; the flask is called sha-chHh (or sha-ti), an inexplicable term (Chavannes in T'oung Pao, 1904, p. 32). A Chinese envoy who visited Bagdad in 1259 reports that the palace of the Caliph was built of fragrant and precious woods, and that its walls were constructed of black and white jade (Bretschneider, Chinese Recorder, Vol. VI, 1875, P- s)- 1 In Japanese boku-giyoku = jet (Geerts, p. 234). 2 Kansu t'ung chi, last edition published in 1736. When passing through the capital of the province, Lan-chou, in January, 1909, I was informed that a new, revised and largely increased edition of this now scarce work was in course of prepa- ration and was expected to be ready at the end of the summer of the same year. 3 "The Embankment of the Red Water." 26 Introduction. The Jesuit missionaries of the eighteenth century seem to have been under the impression that jade was produced in the provinces of Shensi and Shansi (see Amiot in Memoires concernant les Chinois, Vol. VI, p. 258). Father Du Halde (A Description of the Empire of China, Vol. I, p. 16, London, 1738) sums up as follows: "The Lapis Armenus [his designation of jade] is not very dear in Yiin-nan,1 where it is found in several places, differing in nothing from what is imported into Europe. 'Tis produced also in the Province of Sze-ch'uan, and in the district of Ta-t'ung fu, belonging to Shansi, which furnishes perhaps the most beautiful Yii-she (jade) in all China; 'tis a kind of white Jasper, the white resembling that of A gat; 'tis transparent, and sometimes spotted when it is polished." The city of Si-ngan fu is still the distributing centre for the un- wrought pieces of jade arriving from Turkistan, and seems to have been so also in former times. Particularly fine bowlders are sometimes kept and guarded as treasures. The bowlder of whitish jade reproduced in Fig. 2 on Plate I was preserved as a precious relic in the Buddhist temple Hing-lung se of Si-ngan fu, where I acquired it for the Field Museum. I was informed there that it had come from Khotan, Turk- istan, a long time ago. It measures 19.5 cm in length, 10.5 cm in width and 14. 1 cm in height, and has a weight of eleven pounds. The other water-rolled bowlder of natural polish in Fig. 1 of the same Plate was found in a dried-up river bed in the northern part of the province of Shensi and represents, also in the opinion of the Chinese, a kind of jade used during the Han period. The correctness of this statement is borne out by worked jade pieces of the Han period in our collection, exhibiting the same material. It is a bluish-green jade clouded with white and leaf-green speckles and sprinkled with large brown and black patches. The lower side is almost entirely occupied by an ivory-white, brown and russet coloring intersected by black strips and veins, almost producing the effect of an agate. This piece weighs somewhat over seven pounds, is 22.5 cm long, 15 cm wide and 5 cm thick. Such bowlders of so-called Han jade have occasionally turned up in the eighteenth century and were then worked into vases or bells or other objects. We shall come back to this point in Chapter VIII. The color of jade was found to be permanent and unchangeable. The Li ki {Yii tsao III, 32) describing the qualities of a brave soldier 1 According to Chinese statements, jade is found in Ch'eng-kiang fu of Yiin-nan Province (G. Dev£ria, Histoire des Relations de la Chine avec l'Annam, p. 91, Paris, 1880). EXPLANATION OF PL. I. Fig. i. Water-rolled Pebble of Jade of the Han Period. Fig. 2. Bowlder from Khotan, Turkistan. FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. X, PL. I. I 2 NEPHRITE BOWLDERS. Introduction. 27 savs of his countenance that it is always the same as jade.1 But like every substance in nature, jade is subject to discoloration and decom- position. This effect is noticeable particularly in the ancient burial pieces of the Chou and Han dynasties which have sometimes under- gone considerable changes during their subterranean history in the grave, and softened to such a degree that they may be mistaken for steatite. "The Chinese are perfectly familiar with the disintegration of the surface and the gradual softening and decomposition of the material which occur in jade long buried in the ground. Jade in its crudest state always contains a greater or less proportion of iron, and this, gradually becoming oxidized by process of time, causes staining of the surface, the color of the stain often extending inward, especially where there happens to be any flaw or vein in the material. All kinds of variegated 'iron-rust' tints are produced in this way, passing from amber-yellow to the deepest brown, and sometimes becoming almost black" (Bishop, Vol. I, p. 232). A peculiar characteristic of the white jades of the Han period is that sometimes thick masses of chalk-white clayish matter permeate the jade substance. The Chinese call them "earth spots" (t'u pan) and attribute their presence to mercury absorbed by the stone while buried. It is impossible to accept this view, as the clay is embodied under the polished surface and must have been present there, before the piece in question was worked and polished. But apparently, these stones were intentionally cut in such a way that the clay became visible through the transparent surface. It seems to me that the Han people may have evinced a particular predilection for this natural phenomenon which usually occurs in ornamental pieces. The character of the following research is such that one investigation is based on the other, and that the single chapters are mutually de- pendent. Chapter II cannot be understood without the knowledge of the first chapter, and the fundamental religious ideas expounded in Chapter V have their basis in the discussions of Chapter II. Again, Chapter VIII cannot be appreciated without an insight into the com- plex subjects of the preceding chapter, as, naturally, the ornaments of the dead are an echo of those of the living ones. In the culture of the Chou, to which a great and indeed the principal part of this material 1 Legge (Li Ki, Vol. II, p. 26) translates: "His complexion showed (the beauty and strength of) a piece of jade," which is apparently not to the point; the tertium comparationis is the unchangeability of the color of jade which is likened to the firm and steady expression of the soldier's face (compare Couvreur, Li Ki, Vol. I, p. 722). 28 Introduction. refers, everything is system and consistent systematization, and each object and the idea illustrated by it must be perceived in close relation to, and in permanent context with, the entire system of the peculiar world-conception of that period. My prospective critics will doubtless appreciate this state of affairs and recognize that it would be vain to select at random the one or other object or point for ready attack, if not taken up and properly understood in connection with the whole subject; whoever is willing to further these studies, must consent, I regret to say, to digest first this material in its entirety. The following pages contain only a small portion of my notes on jades. It would have been easy to increase them to double and more of their present extent, and to present them in a more readable form, if I had the privilege of the leisure of an author. The daily demands made by the immediate task of cataloguing and installing a large collection are not favorable to literary activity, and the necessity of working up in the near future an appalling quantity of other materials did not allow me to delve in this particular subject with that copious- ness of detail which would have been desirable. Though dealing with polished jade, these notes will be found more crude than polished, and indeed pretend to be nothing more than chips and shavings from a workshop. May others take up and pursue the threads where they dropped from my hand. I. JADE AND OTHER STONE IMPLEMENTS The number of stone implements hitherto discovered on Chinese soil is exceedingly small, a fact to be accounted for in several ways. First it is due to the lack of systematic archaeological searchings and excavations on sound methods handicapped by the prejudices of the people ; secondly, the indifference of the Chinese towards these seemingly trifling objects which bear no inscriptions and therefore offer no antiqua- rian interest to them. While they have delved at all times in the graves of their ancestors to their hearts' delight to revel in antiquities of bronze, jade, or pottery, they left unnoticed or carelessly threw aside minor objects of stone and bone or small fragments which seem to us of primary scientific importance. A third reason, and probably the most weighty of all, will be found in the fact which we shall establish in the course of this investigation that, as far as the present state of our archaeological knowledge and the literary records point out, the Chinese have never passed through an epoch which for other culture- regions has been designated as a stone age. We can merely assert at the present time with some degree of cer- tainty that at some remote indefinable period stone implements have been in use to a certain extent within the boundaries of what we now call the Chinese empire; this does not yet mean that they have been manufactured and employed by Chinese peoples themselves, as many other groups of tribes related and unrelated to the Chinese have been inhabiting the empire. It is therefore safe only to speak of stone implements of China, whereas it is not warranted to speak of Chinese stone implements. The evidence for such stone implements is furnished by three sources: (i) by a number of actual specimens which have come down to us, (2) by references made to such implements in Chinese records, and (3) by survivals of such plain implements in more elaborate ceremonial implements of later ages usually made of jade, or of other materials like copper and bronze. We shall take up these subjects gradatim. Before discussing a considerable amount of new material here published for the first time, it may be advisable to sum up briefly what has become known of such stone implements in our literature. On April 30, 1884, the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society contained a paper by the mineralogist Heinrich Fischer in Freiburg "On Stone Implements in Asia," in which a survey of stone implements then known from India, China, Siberia and Japan is given. 29 32 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. that also in the Shantung stone implements to be described by me this feature does not occur. But I am not going either to insist on the Chinese origin of the latter. We cannot separate archaeological finds from their locality, and as the only conspicuous evidence available for the Anderson collection is that the objects forming it sprang up on the very territory occupied by the Shan, it will be safe to ascribe their origin to a non-Chinese culture-group, and to place certain restrictions on them in a consideration of Chinese archaeology; they belong, not to the archaeology of the Chinese, but of China in a geographical sense. Recently, J. Coggin Brown,1 following the path of Anderson, has examined and described twelve stone implements gathered in T'&ng- yueh or Momien, nine of which are said to be made from various jade- ites ; he upholds the authenticity of the implements traded in that district in opposition to Anderson, but on grounds which are hardly convincing. E. Colborne Baber2 reports the discovery in a stone sarcophagus of a polished stone axehead of serpentine in Ch'ung-k'ing, Sze-ch'uan Province, and of a chisel of polished flint which he found in the posses- sion of an opium-smoker who was scraping the opium stains from his fingers with the edge of the implement; he said that he had found it, and another, in a stone coffin in a field near his house. "It is therefore undeniable," concludes Baber, "that these objects are found in con- nection with coffins, though what the connection may be is not clear. The natives call them hsieh 'wedges' and conceive that their use was to fasten down the lids of sarcophagi in some unexplained manner. A more plausible supposition is that they were buried with the dead in conformity with some traditional or superstitious rite; at any rate the theory is impossible that the people who hollowed out these ponderous monoliths worked with stone chisels, and left their tools inside. " Unfor- tunately, the author does not give any description nor figures of his two specimens which he kept in his private collection, and I have no means of ascertaining what has become of them. Nevertheless, his account is valuable in that it shows the burial of stone implements with the dead in Sze-ch'uan, and we shall see that the same custom prevailed in Shensi. A stone hatchet found by Williams in a mound forty feet high near Kalgan has been described by J. Edkins.3 The mound belongs to a large collection of graves, large and small, about seven miles east of the city of Yii chou, and no miles west of Peking. An ancient wall, nearly 1 Stone Implements from the Teng-yueh District, Yunnan Province, Western China {Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. V, 1910, pp. 299- 305, 2 plates). 2 Travels and Researches in Western China, pp. 129-131 (in Royal Geographical Society, Supplementary Papers, Vol. I, London, 1886). 3 Stone Hatchets in China {Nature, Vol. XXX, pp. 515-516, 1884). Compare the review by H. Fischer in Archiv fur Anthropologic, Vol. XVI, 1886, pp. 241-243. Feb., 1912. Jade. 33 round, twenty feet high and about eight miles in circumference, is still in existence there. The mound in which the hatchet was found is in the line of this wall — that is, the wall runs north-west and south-east from it. Hence the wall-builders did not regard the mound as sacred, for it would not in that case have been made to serve the purpose of a wall to their city on the south-west side. There is another large mound known as the grave of Tai Wang. It is a little to the east of the centre of the inclosed space once a city, and the principal road runs through the city by this mound from east to west. Rev. Mark Williams of Kalgan, who found the hatchet, and was the first foreigner to draw attention to the old city, was struck with the general resemblance of the mounds, the wall and the hatchet to what he is familiar with in Ohio. So close was the similarity that it seemed to him to require that the same class of persons who made the one should have made the other. Several pieces of broken pottery were found in the neighborhood of this mound, and their pattern is said to differ from modern crockery. The hatchet is about five inches long, and is made of a black stone not heavy. Fischer concludes from this statement that it is likely to be a serpentine whose specific weight varies between 2.3 and 2.9. Nothing is said in regard to the shape and technique of the hatchet. Mark Williams himself has given the following account of this find:1 "From Kalgan to Yu chou are ancient mounds in cluster on the plain or singly on eminences. These latter would indicate signal towers, while the former would suggest tombs. They are about thirty feet high, circular and oval in shape, and no arrangement can be observed in the clusters. "At the base of a signal mound by the great wall of Kalgan I found a stone axe. "The Chinese give no rational explanation of these mounds. I have as yet found no mention of them in ancient records. At Yu chou, one hundred miles south of Kalgan, is a cluster of forty mounds ; four miles off are ruins of a city wall. Chinese cities have rectangular walls, with towers at short intervals. But this is a circular embankment with no remains of towers. The part of the remaining entrance is unlike the gate of a Chinese city. Records state that this was the seat of a Chinese prince who lived b. c. 200. In some places the wall is levelled, in other places it is perfect, making an acute angle at the summit. Cultivation has narrowed the bases of the mounds, but superstition prevents their destruction. To one familiar with the 'Ancient Earth-works in China. Annual Report of ths Smithsonian Institution, 1885, Part I, p. 907, Washington, 1886. 34 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. works of the mound builders in the Mississippi Valley, the stone ax, the mounds, circular wall, suggest a similar race." Two flint arrow-heads, both without barbs, found by the well-known naturalist Armand David in Mongolia in 1866, have been published by E. T. Hamy.1 They are finely polished, recalling similar pieces still in use at the time of the arrival of the first Russian explorers in eastern Siberia. Hamy basing his evidence on a statement in David's diary points out the comparatively recent origin of these finds which have been made in a black diluvial soil together with small fragments of pottery and metal instruments, and with the remains of recent animals. It is therefore necessary, concludes Hamy, for the moment at least, to abandon the theory of a Mongol quaternary man and the ingenious considerations prematurely attached to it.2 At all events, these two arrow-heads rather seem to point in the direction of Siberian than of Chinese antiquity. Dr. Bushell (in Bishop, Vol. I, p. 29) mentions one jade arrow-head in his private collection. Enrico H. Giglioli 3 has described a stone implement found in 1896 by F. C. Coltelli in Yen-ngan fu, Shensi Province, and designated as a yao ch'an "medicine spade." It is flat, of rectangular shape (22.8 cm long, 8.5 — 10.5 cm wide, 1.1 cm thick), with a perforation in the upper end bored from one side only, with a diameter of 3.1 cm on the one side and 2.3 cm on the other side, so that the perforation has the shape of an obtuse cone. Altogether it resembles the types figured by me on Plate V. Giglioli asserts that it did not serve as a battle-axe, but as a mattock in husbandry. The material, he calls "fine jasper "(?) and defines the colors of it as yellow, gray and white. For the rest, he depends on the Anderson collection, eleven specimens of which are reproduced and listed as Chinese. In the Bishop collection, there is a small polished celt (No. 324) made by Bushell (Vol. II, p. 106) previous to the Han dynasty and described by him as "perforated for use as an amulet, with rounded corners and bevelled rim, one face being perfectly flat, the other having a bevelled cutting edge; in Burma as well as in southwestern China, such amulets are supposed to make the wearer invulnerable." Another celt in the same collection is decorated with the "thunder-pattern" (meander) and the monster Vao-Vieh of which Bushell thinks it may 1 Note sur les silex taill£s d'Eul-Che-San-hao {Bulletin du Museum d'Histoire naturelle, Vol. IV, pp. 46-48, Paris, 1898, 2 Figs.). See also the note by J. Deniker, The Races of Man, p. 362. 2 On the glacial period in Mongolia see now G. Merzbacher, Zur Eiszeitfrage in der nordwestlichen Mongolei {Petermann's Mitteilungen, Vol. 57, 191 1, p. 18). 3 L'eta della pietra nella Cina colla descrizione di alcuni esemplari nella mia collezione, in Archivio per I'antropologia e la etnologia, Vol. XXVIII, p. 374, Firenze, 1898. Feb., 191 2. Jade. 35 have been intended for a votive offering to a temple of the Thunder- god who was more worshipped in early days than now ; but this supposi- tion is not supported by any Chinese text. Another celt in the Bishop collection bears the inscription Hua-shih sheng ch'un, "May the Hua family flourish like spring! " This inscription looks very suspicious and is certainly a recent additional improvement. Bushell calls these miniature celts by a Chinese name yao ch'an "medicine spades." l The new material here submitted consists of two groups from two different localities; first, a collection of fifteen jade implements made by me in Si-ngan fu and illustrated on Plates II — VIII, and secondly, a collection of twelve stone implements originating from Ts'ing-chou fu in Shantung Province. The former lot has come to light from ancient graves in the province of Shensi, all situated west of the present city of Si-ngan along the road to the old town of Hien-yang. These graves are justly considered by the Chinese living in that locality as belonging to the period of the Chou dynasty (b. c. 1122-249), and the aspect of these implements found in them points to the same period, so that the internal evidence corroborates the historical tradition. They are all made of beautiful qualities of jade, highly polished and of most exquisite colors, such as is no longer mined, the supply having been exhausted long ago, but such as was found on the very soil of the province in that epoch to which these objects must be referred. The stone hammer of dark -green jade, without perforation, repre- sented on Plate II, Fig. 1, is of particular interest, because only the blade is polished, while all other parts, also the lateral sides, are inten- tionally roughened to afford a firm grip to the hand clasping the ham- mer in using it. On the face shown in the illustration, the polished blade extends only 5 cm in length against 1 2 cm on the opposite face, while the total length of the implement amounts to 14.5 cm; its width over the back is 5 cm, over the blade 6.5 cm; its thickness is 2.5 cm near the butt and reaches 3.5 cm in the middle. Above the polished portion on the face visible in our plate a slight depression will be ob- served, apparently used for resting a finger in; there is another on the 1 In the June number of Man, p. 81 (Vol. XI, 191 1) there is a brief article by R. A. Smith on The Stone Age in Chinese Turkestan, illustrating on a plate twenty- four worked stones collected by M. A. Stein in the Lop-nor desert. Two jade celts and three arrow or lance-points are the only implements in this lot. The material is not such as to allow us to establish any historical connections, and is doubtless not associated with Chinese culture. — In the July number of T'oung Pao (191 1, P- 437). Chavannes reviews a paper by Torii Ryuzo on his archaeological explora- tion of southern Manchuria (in Japanese, Tokyo, 1910); he discovered prehistoric remains on the peninsula Liao-tung where he excavated stone axes and arrow-heads, fragments of pottery decorated with various geometric designs, stone weights and bone awls for the use of fishermen. I regret I have not yet had occasion to see this important paper. 36 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. upper left edge, and a still deeper round cavity on the opposite face near the back. These various features combine to show that this hammer was not hafted, but freely worked with in the hand, and the edge shows conspicuous traces of ancient use. The edge is curved and more rounded on one side than on the other. The small axe shown in Fig. 3 of the same Plate (7.2 cm long, 3.9 cm wide over the back, 4.7 cm over the middle, and 4.4 cm over the edge; greatest thickness 3.4 cm), of a finely polished light-green jade, is of the same type, generally. It is entirely polished except the butt. There is an oblong piece with rough surface cut out of one of the lateral sides for a finger-support, and there is a shallow round depression on the lower face for the same purpose. The cutting edge, very fine and sharp, is almost straight, forming right angles with the lateral sides. Fig. 2 on Plate II is a flat chisel, thick in the centre and gradually sloping towards the edges. It is perforated near the back. All sides are convex in shape, and the cutting edge runs in a big graceful curve. The blade is not set off as in other pieces. It measures in length 1 1.5 cm, 6-7.5 crri in width and 1.5 cm in thickness in the central portion. The jade exhibits a leaf -green color containing various shades of green intermingled with black streaks. The large heavy hammer (weight 3^ lbs.) on Plate III is the most remarkable specimen among these jade implements from the graves of Shensi. It is carved from a fine plant-green jade covered on the lower face and the one lateral side visible in the plate with iron- rust colored spots (black in the illustration). In shape, it is unlike any of the others, and though the blade is formed like that of a hammer (compare Plate II, Fig. 1), it ends abruptly in a broad and blunt edge (2.2 cm high) exhibiting a rough surface evidently much used for pound- ing. The general shape of the implement is rectangular, the lower face and the butt are almost plain, the lateral sides are straight. The upper surface is slanting in two planes towards the butt. Two large perforations are bored by means of a tubular drill1 through the central part of the body, side by side, separated only by a narrow strip 1 mm in width and translucent when struck by the light. The two holes have been bored from the top where they form fairly regular circles (the one 3.5 cm, the other 3.8 cm in diameter), while they are more irregular on the lower face. It is hard to see the purpose of these two hollow cylinders, if it was not the object to diminish the weight of this heavy piece. The two tubes cut out were, of course, very useful to yield the material for other carvings. The perforation near the butt was convenient when using the implement as a pounder; the palm 'Described in Bishop, Vol. I, p. 203 and Bushell, Chinese Art, Vol. I, p. 144. FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. X, PL. IV. Jade Chisel of Chou Period, from shensi Province. Feb., 1912. Jade. 37 clutched around the butt, while thumb and middle finger caught into the hole from above and below. The chisel on Plate IV is of extraordinary size and weight (2l/2 lbs.), 22 cm long, 1 1.7 cm wide above and 14.5 cm wide below, and 1 cm thick; it is somewhat thicker in the centre and gradually sloping from there towards the edges. The upper edge is somewhat slanting, the sides are slightly convex, and the blade makes an elegantly curved sweep. It is blunt, about 2 mm wide. The implement was accordingly ceremonial, as shown also by its size and weight. The large eye (2.5 cm in diameter) is just in the centre between the two lateral sides and has been drilled equally from the upper and lower face forming a pro- jecting rim in the middle of the interior. The color of the stone is of an indistinct gray interspersed all over with deep -yellow spots (which show black in the plate). On Plate V three chisels are shown. That in Fig. 1 is of oblong rectangular shape (15 cm long, 2.2-3.2 cm wide, and 1 cm thick) of milk-white opaque jade with yellow streaks and spots, perforated near the handle where a small piece is chipped off. The edge is but slightly rounded, almost straight and angular; it is blunt now, having appar- ently been long in use, and cracked, earthy matter having deeply pen- etrated into it. Fig. 2 represents the same type (15.5 cm long, 3.7-4.2 cm wide, and 9 mm thick in the middle) of a light sea-green jade. Above and below the perforation, a leaf -shaped cavity (7.5 cm long) in the surface will be noticed which offered a convenient resting-place for the second finger when the thumb and third finger clasped the narrow sides in using the instrument for cutting or scraping. The edge is still sharp, very little curved; the blade is gradually sloping towards the edge over 0.5 cm. The perforation has been effected from one face only, i-e. from the face opposite the one shown in the plate where the diameter is 1 cm while on the face shown it is only 0.5 cm. The piece in Fig. 3 (14 cm long, 5.2-6.2 cm wide, 2-5 mm thick) is one of exceptional beauty because of the quality and color of its jade which has the appearance of ivory.1 It forms a flat rectangle tapering, as also the others, towards the handle. The two eyes are drilled from the side shown in the plate (0.8 and 1.2 cm in diameter). The edge is slightly curved and bevelled off at the corners. This piece is so elegantly polished and of such elaborate material and workmanship that it cannot have been employed for ordinary use. The two perforations point also to its ceremonial character. The chisel in Fig. 1, Plate VI, is made of a deep-black jade spotted in the lower portion with grayish-blue clouds as visible in the repro- 1 Called by the Chinese " chickenbone- white " (chi ku pai). 38 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. duction. It is 14.5 cm long, 3 cm wide over the back and 6.2 cm over the blade, 1.1 cm thick. The eye is drilled from one side only, the one not shown in the plate where the diameter is 1.3 cm, while on the op- posite face it is only 7 mm, so that the interior wall which is well polished assumes the shape of an obtuse cone. It will be noticed that there is on the left lateral edge running along the lower face a projecting ridge which affords a support to the finger in handling the implement. On the opposite lateral side, the lower edge is flattened out into a strip about 3 mm wide. Both lateral sides are not vertical, but slightly slanting in such a way that a cut made latitudinally would show a trapezoid. The blade with pointed curved edge is short, and as usual, bilateral, while the specimen in Fig. 2 has a unilateral blade, but other- wise resembling Fig. 1 in shape and having the same slanting lateral sides . There is no perforation . There are two curious incisions in the left lateral side, one in the upper left corner running from the middle of the back across to the lateral side, the other below it, a small segment of the size and shape of a thumb-nail being cut out of the lower face. It is easy to see that these two incisions afforded a hold to the finger- nails, and that this implement was handled in such a manner that the thumb lay flat on the right lateral side, the nail of the second finger fitting into the upper left incision and the nail of the middle finger into the lower incision on the left lateral side. No doubt this specimen has been in actual use. It measures 7 cm in length, 1.7 cm in width over the back, and 2.6 cm over the blade, and is 1 . 1 cm thick. It is made of a jade of very peculiar coloration, a kind of soap-green, white light and dark blue -mottled, darker shades of green in more continuous masses and larger white spots being displayed over the lower face. The knife-shaped object in Fig. 4, Plate VI, is carved out of a beau- tiful transparent leaf -green jade (only 3 mm thick) interspersed with masses of deep-black specks designated as "moss" {Vai) by the Chinese. If held against the light, it presents a beautiful effect. The very delicate character of this implement is sufficient proof for its having never been put to any profane use. The blade (on the left side) is merely indicated and only 2 mm wide, while the cutting edge is blunt (}4 mm thick) and of the same thickness as the two straight lateral edges. In length it measures 12 cm, in width 3.6-3.9 cm. The eye (diameter 5 mm) is bored from the two faces, and exactly in the middle of the interior wall a very regular ring is left, evidently with intention. This implement, no doubt, was an emblem of power and rank and belongs to the category of objects discussed in the next chapter. The jade chisel in Plate VII, Fig. 1, is of a similar type as that in Fig. 2, Plate VI, only somewhat longer and thicker (8.5 cm long, 2 cm FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. X, PL. VI. IH^HH Jade Chisels and Other Implements of Chou Period, from Shensi Province Feb., 191 2. Jade. 39 wade, 1.4 cm thick). It is shown in front (a) and side-view (b). It is grouped here with a bronze chisel (Fig. 2), trapezoidal in section (10.2 cm long), with long socket, to show the close agreement in form between the stone and metal chisels. The stone (presumably jadeite) represented in Fig. 3 of Plate VI has been found in a grave of the Han period in the village Wan-ls'un west of Si-ngan. Nothing is known about the manner of its use in the grave. The Chinese call it "blood-stone" from the peculiar blood-red color covering the greater part of the upper surface, which besides shows layers of a deep black and along the left side a portion of a jade-white tinge. The lower face and the edge are black over which an indistinct stratum of red is strewn. The natural form of the stone is evidently preserved in it, and besides the high polishing, the effect of human work is visible in the deeply cut incision in the upper right corner where one small triangular piece has been sawn out. The traces of the saw are distinctly visible; the sawing was done along the slanting portion, and after sawing through, the piece was broken out, as can be recognized from the rough, irregular surface of the horizontal plane, while the slanting plane is smooth. Beside this, there is a shallow depression made rough which might have served for the insertion of the thumb, indicating that this stone was used as an implement for battering or pounding, the triangular point being held below; but the nature of the incision remains unexplained. I believe that the workman had some plan in mind of sawing and grinding this piece into shape ; the beginning of his activity is here shown, and for some unknown reason, he was stopped or prevented from continuing his work. The implement is 7 cm long, 5.5. cm wide, and 1.6- 1.9 cm thick. The blood-red color is explained by the Chinese as having originated from the blood of the corpse penetrating into the stone,1 which is certainly fanciful. The large jade knife in Fig. 1 , Plate VIII , is a unique specimen of extra- ordinary dimensions, unfortunately broken in two pieces when found, two fragments being lost, without detracting from the possibility of realizing the original form. It is of rectangular trapezoidal shape, measuring in length over the central perforation 35 cm, over the back 34 cm, over the cutting edge 36.9 cm; the upper edge is 13.5 cm long, the lower 11 cm; the width varies between 11 and 13.2 cm, being 11.8 cm in the middle, on account of the concave cutting edge curved inwardly. The blade is 1.7 cm wide in the central portion and gradually diminishes in width towards both sides; it shows the same form and dimensions on both faces and the same angle of inclination. The thickness is only 1 This view is expressed also by many authors, e. g. in the Wu li siao shih by Fang I-chih (edition o£ 1884), Ch. 7, p. 15 a. 40 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 4 mm along the back and increases from there in the direction towards the blade to 6 mm. The blade is transparent when viewed against the light. Many notches are visible in the cutting edge from which it might follow that actual cutting has been done with it. The back, and the upper and lower edges are carefully beveled. There are five perfora- tions,1 the three stretching in one vertical line parallel with the back having the same size (i.i cm in diameter), while the central hole has a diameter of 1.5 cm and the one below of 0.5 cm; the boring has been executed from one face only, as can be seen also in the illustration; the projecting rings there visible are on the same level as the opposite face. The walls of these perforations are well polished as in all cases known to me. The fundamental color of the jade is light -green, full of black veins and spots and of white clouds, as may be recognized in the repro- duction. Also this implement doubtless belongs to the emblems of power as described in the next chapter. Figure 2, Plate VIII, represents also an extraordinary specimen 40.4 cm long, 5.2-6.2 cm wide, and 1.8 cm thick. It is a chisel cut out of a grayish silvery jade in which specks like silver clouds are strewn all over. The perforation has been drilled from both faces, the two borings not meeting exactly, and a projecting ring being left in the interior. The cutting edge is broken off, and apparently in times long ago. That no more than the edge is broken, can be seen from the lateral sides just tapering into a narrow strip above the breakage. The lateral edge, partially showing in the illustration, is hollowed out in a flat, long seg- ment which is in a plane a bit lower than the remaining portion of this edge; this was perhaps done to afford a firmer grip to the second finger when handling the instrument. A jade dagger, unique for its material, size and shape, is in the collec- tion of H. E. Tuan Fang, Peking, and here reproduced in Plate IX from a photograph kindly presented by him to the author. It was dug up in 1903 not far from the old city of Feng-siang fu in Shensi Province from a considerable depth and is, in all probability, older than the Chou period. Its substance is a peculiar light-reddish jade, such as I have seen in no other specimen, designated by the Chinese hung pao yii (Giles No. 5269). It is a two-edged dagger (92 cm long and 12 cm wide), both edges being equally sharp, running into a point bent over to one side, not central as in the later bronze daggers. Another peculiar feature is the flattening out of the two surfaces of the blade into four distinct zones running longitudinally. At the end of the blade a rectangular band, filled with cross-hatchings and surrounded on either side by four parallel incisions, is engraved. A rectangular, perforated hilt (16 cm long) is sharply set off from the blade, near which 1 Compare a similar arrangement of four perforations in Fig. 40. Feb., iqi2. Jade. 4i runs across a band filled with parallel oblique lines. Five bands, each consisting of four deeply grooved lines, are laid out in the opposite direction on the other side of the eye. The same ornaments are ex- ecuted on both faces. It is evident that this elaborate and costly production was never destined for any prac- tical purpose, but that it served either in some religious ceremony, or as an emblem of power, perhaps of sovereignty (compare Ch. II). Ceremonial jade axes were still turned out at the time of the earlier Han dynasty, as we may safely infer from a report in the Ku yii t'u p'u (Ch. 28, pp. 6, 8), saying that in the period Shun-hua of the Sung dynasty (990-995 a. d.) a certain man opened the tomb of Huai- nan Wang 1 of the Han dynasty from which he obtained precious jades, and among these two jade axe-heads: "hence it is known," the author adds, "that they are objects from the beginning of the Han period." The two pieces are alike in shape and design, formed in what the Chinese call a "rolled or coiled-up cloud" (k'iiian yiin), i. e. the edge terminates on both ends in a convolute spiral ; the blade has three round perforations arranged in a vertical row as in the corresponding bronze types after which these pieces were evidently modeled. There is a socket at the lower end for the reception of a handle (Fig. 1). Jade axes {yii tsi) 2 in connection with red-colored shields were used in the hands of dancers performing the dance Ta wu in the ancestral 1 Title of the Taoist adept Liu Ngan, second century B. c. * They are not "jade-adorned axes," as Legge (Li Ki, Vol. II, p. 33) translates, or "hacheorn£e de jade" (Couvreur, Vol. I, p. 731) which, first of all, is not justi- fied by the two simple Chinese words meaning only "jade axe," and secondly, what is and means an axe adorned with jade? No such thing exists or has ever existed, but there are jade axes made exclusively of jade (except the wooden handle) which it is doubtless easier to make than to adorn, e. g. a bronze axe with jade. Fig. i. Ancient Jade Axe (from Ku yii t'u p'u). 42 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. temple of Chou-kung in the kingdom of Lu {Li ki, Ming fang wet, 10), but also by the Emperor in the temple of Heaven {kiao miao). It is Fig. 3. Jade Dance-Axes (from Ku yii t'u P'u) to this passage that the Ku yii Vu p'u (Ch. 27, p. 10) refers in describing a ceremonial jade axe on which the head of a phenix is engraved. "It is an implement of the early Ts'in period and cannot come down from the Han or Wei dynasties," is added in the descriptive text. Feb., 1912. Jade. 43 Figures 2 and 3 represent two other dance-axes illustrated in the Ku yii t'u p'u, both ascribed to the Han period. The one is made of jade pale-yellow and bright-white in color, without flaw and engraved with the monster t'ao-t'ieh (in the text called huang tnu "the yellow- eyed") and a cicada pattern (chart wen) by which the leaf -shaped prongs are understood, so frequently displayed on the bronze beakers called ts'iDi. The other axe-head (Fig. 3) is of a bright-white jade with greenish speckles comparable to moss and decorated with "cloud and ^Anjb\=^ Fig. 4. Hatchet of Yellow Red-Spotted Jade. #*^j#L thunder" (yiin lei) patterns (meanders) and cicada designs with leaf veins. It will be readily seen that these ceremonial jade hatchets of the Han are widely different in their artistic shapes and decorations from those of the Chou period, which are plain and unpretentious. Another hatchet of jade is figured by Wu Ta-ch'eng in his Ku yii Vu k'ao (reproduced in Fig. 4) and explained by him as an ancient dance-axe on the ground of the passages referred to. It will be rec- ognized that this specimen is much simpler than any of the Han dynasty, and I am inclined to place it in the Chou period. Its rectangular shape, the form of its cutting edge, the perforation in the butt are all features occurring in the Chou celts, while the peculiar indentations in the lateral sides betrav the ritualistic character. 44 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. In the Kin-shih so, two ancient bronze hatchets are well figured (Figs. 5 and 6), the one obtained from Lo-yang (Honan Province), the other from Lu-shih Men (Honan Province). The latter (Fig. 6) is interesting with ref- erence to the jade dance-axes in exhibiting a more primitive form of the triangular pattern, and it is very interesting to take note of the interpretation of the brothers Feng that this orna- ment is a yang win "a pattern of the male principle." l The piece in Fig. 5 is remarkable for its circular blade and the two lateral crescent-shaped barbs; the rectangular butt was stuck into the cleft of the wooden handle. Fig. 5. Ancient Bronze Hatchet (from Kin-shih so). IT Fig. 6. Ancient Bronze Hatchet (from Kin-shih so). We are naturally led to the inquiry, what was the symbolical signif- icance of jade chisels, knives and other implements buried in the grave with the dead? We noticed that the late Dr. Bushell, chiefly relying 1 They expressly deny that it has the function of a written character. Chinese wording certainly means in our language a phallic emblem. The Feb., 1912. Jade. 45 on Anderson's statement, explained the miniature jade celts as protec- tive amulets. This, however, is a very recent development. I am not aware of the fact that any such minute celts have ever been discovered in a grave; they result from surface finds, and many of them may be just a few centuries old.1 The wearing of jade celts as personal adorn- ments is not older than the Han period, as shown by two artistic spec- imens in our collection (Plate XXVIII, Figs. 3 and 4) found in Han graves. The first literary allusion to such charm celts occurs in the Po wu chi of the third century a. d. (see p. 64). As early as the Shang dynasty (b. c. 1 766-1 122), the axe seems to have been the victorious emblem of the sovereign. In the sacrificial ode Ch'angfa (Legge, Shi king, Vol. II, p. 642) in praise of the house of Shang, the founder of the dynasty T'ang is described as "the martial king displaying his banner, and with reverence grasping his axe, like a blazing fire which no one can repress."2 The axe was accordingly a sovereign and martial emblem, and the emperors of the Chou dynasty had a pattern of axes embroidered on their robes (called fu, Giles No. 3630). This ornament was the eleventh among the twelve chang embroidered on the imperial state-robe (Legge, Chinese Classics, Vol. Ill, pp. 80-81). Embroideries with representations of the axes fu were used on the altar of the God T'ai-i "the Supreme Unity," "the most venerable among the gods," as told in a hymn addressed to him in the "Annals of the Former Han Dynasty" (Chavannes, Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. Ill, p. 618). There was a constellation called "the Axes" which, being bright, foreshadowed the employment of axes, and when in motion, a levy of troops. The axes symbolize the events in the army and refer to the 1 E. g., in Bishop (Vol. II, p. 208), a ceremonial axe (No. 637) for display on the altar of a Taoist temple is figured and described; it is attributed to the K'ien- lung period (1 736-1 795). Its back is straight, the sides concave, and the edge rounded and convex in outline. The figure of a lion stands on the top of the back, and two winged monsters covered with spiral designs are attached to the sides in d jour carving. 2 A ditty in the Shi king (Legge, Vol. I, p. 240) reads thus: "In hewing the wood for an axe-handle, how do you proceed? Without another axe it cannot be done. In taking a wife, how do you proceed? Without a go-between it cannot be done." Biot (in Legge's Prolegomena, p. 165) refers to the Pi-pa ki, a drama of the ninth century, in which the go-between presents herself with an axe as the emblem of her mission, and cites upon the subject this passage of the Book of Songs. The commentary does not say, remarks Biot, whether this custom of carrying an axe as an emblem be ancient; the go-between makes even a parade of her learning in explaining to the father of the young lady, whom she has come to ask for, why she carries an axe. In my opinion, this is merely a literary jest of the playwright. It does not follow either from the above passage that the negotiator of a marriage actually carried an axe as emblem ; the making of an axe-handle by means of an axe is simply used jocosely by way of a metaphor, which occurs also in another song (Ibid., p. 157). 46 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. execution made in times of war (Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise, p. 298). We shall see in the next chapter that the jade emblems of sovereign power were made in the shape of hammers, knives and other imple- ments, and that these were connected with an ancient form of solar worship; this investigation will shed new light on the reasons for the burial of jade implements in the grave. Being emblems, and originally, in all probability, images of the solar deity, they shared in the quality of sun-light to dispel darkness and demons, and were efficient weapons in warding off from the dead all evil and demoniacal influences. l Owing to the kindness of Mr. S. Couling, a medical missionary in the English Baptist Mission in Ts'ing-chou fu, Shantung Province, I am enabled to lay here before the reader twelve stone implements discovered by this gentleman in the vicinity of his station. They had been loaned by him to the Royal Scottish Museum of Edinburgh, and Mr. Walter Clark, Curator of the Museum, by request of Mr. Couling, has shown me the courtesy of forwarding these specimens to me for investigation. I avail myself of this opportunity to herewith express my thanks also publicly to both Mr. Couling and Mr. Clark for their generous liberality, to which a considerable advance in our scanty knowledge of stone implements from China is due. Mr. Couling, who deserves the honor of being credited with the discovery, wrote to me on September 22, 1905, from Ts'ing-chou fu in regard to these finds: "These specimens, with the exception of one (Plate XII, Fig. 5) the origin of which is unknown, have been found in this immediate neigh- borhood, say within a radius of ten miles from the city during the last few years. Most of them have been obtained through my schoolboys. On knowing of what I wanted some remembered to have seen such things, some knew neighbors who had them; others went out searching and found a few. The finds are made in ploughed fields or in river beds 2 or in the loess cliffs not far down. The Chinese pay no heed to them, only sometimes troubling to keep one as being a somewhat curious stone. I should say there must be plenty more, though it is nearly a year since I obtained the last, but they are not easy to collect, as the people do not recognize their value." Jade does not occur in any of these specimens, for the apparent rea- son that this mineral is not found in situ in Shantung; they are all made of easily procured common local stones of the character of talco-hem- 1 The reader may be referred to Chapter VIII of De Groot, The Religious System of China, Vol. VI (Leiden, 1910), where a full and able discussion of this subject is given. 2 This statement is in full accord with that given by Chinese authors (see below). Feb., 1912. Jade. 47 atite schist, with the exception of the grooved hammer, which is diorite, but all of them are highly polished. In glancing over the eleven objects represented on the three Plates X-XII, it will be noticed that all of them lack that one characteristic feature of the Shensi implements, the perforation. Mr. Couling has, however, succeeded in finding at a later date a perforated chisel, reproduced after a sketch of his in Fig. 7, of a grayish white hard marble-like stone with slightly convex lateral edges and with a perforation not far above the centre of the surface. The borings have been effected from each face, meeting inexactly at the middle, as shown by the dotted lines in the sketch. This piece perfectly agrees in shape with the corresponding types of Shensi and has probably been used as a mattock. Perforations in stone implements have had a significance and a purpose; if they are large enough to allow the insertion of a wooden or bone haft, we shall not fail to conclude that such has actually been the case. If the perforations are so small in diameter that such a contrivance seems out of the question, we are led to the belief that they served only for the passage of a thong or cord from which the implement was suspended and perhaps fastened to the girdle, or that some kind of ceremonial usage was involved ; we may infer in this latter case that the perforation has the function of a conventional survival in remembrance of its former more intense utilization. As Giglioli correctly supposed, the broad rectangular type of stone chisel with large eye near the back seems to have served as a mattock in husbandry. I am not inclined to think that pieces of precious jade in beautiful colors have ever been turned to such a purpose; but if we realize that such types as repre- sented on Plate II, Fig. 2, and Plate IV were simply made of ordinary stone with all necessary adaptations, we can recognize in them the agricultural implement in question. And in the specimen from Shan- tung (Fig. 7) a real mattock of common stone has come down to us. In certain parts of northern China, such mattocks are still actually in use. W. W. Rockhill (Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet, p. 46) made the following observation on the bank of the Yellow Fig. 7. Perforated Stone Chisel from Shan- tung (after Sketch furnished by Mr. Couling). 48 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. River in the north-eastern part of Kansu Province: "There is now going on a curious process of agriculture which shows how little the Chinese understand saving of labor. The farmers dig up a large patch of the surface of each field, cart it back to their farm-yards and there let the clods of earth dry, when they take a mallet (or a stone hammer with an eye drilled through it in which to fix a long handle) , and reduce it all to powder; with this is then mixed what manure they have been able to collect on the road, and this top dressing is laboriously carted back and spread over the field from which nine-tenths of its component parts were a few days before quite as laboriously taken away." Even the modern iron mattock has clearly preserved in shape and perforation its relationship to its stone predecessor. It is of the same rectangular form with straight edge, and a wooden handle standing vertically against its surface is stuck through the hole. This subject is of great significance for the history of agriculture. Everywhere in Eastern Asia we can observe two principal and distinct methods in the cultivation of cereals, which are often employed side by side in the same geographical area, but then as a rule by representatives of different tribes differentiated as to the degree of their culture. The one method bears a close resemblance to our process of gardening, except that broadcast sowing obtains, and the hoe or mattock is almost the only tool utilized in it (hoe-culture). The other method identical with true agriculture is based on the principle of the plough drawn by cattle, on the laying-out of fields in terraces and the appliance of arti- ficial irrigation. There is a sharp line of demarcation between hoe- culture and plough-culture, each being a well-defined sphere in itself, the latter not having developed from the former. The aspect of the development of the two stages is of a purely historical character, as far as Eastern Asia is concerned. There, the Chinese are the represent- atives of plough-culture, and so are the great groups of Shan and Burmese tribes, in short the entire stock comprised under the name Indochinese because of their affinity in language; the, aboriginal tribes gradually pushed back by the Chinese in their onward march towards the south and designated by them with the generic name Man, as well as the Mon-Khmer or South-east-Asiatic group (Schmidt's Austronesians) , were originally only representatives of hoe-culture. In many localities, they received the plough from their more powerful conquerors and adopted with it their methods of tilling; in others, they have still pre- served their original state, as may be seen from numerous reports,1 1 This subject deserves a special monograph. Many intricate problems, as the domestication of cattle, the history of the wheeled cart which appears only in the stage of plough-culture and is absent in hoe-culture, the history of rice-cultivation and terraced fields, are here involved, which could be discussed only at great length. I can make here only these brief allusions, in order to define the historical position of the stone mattock. Feb., 1912. Jade. 49 from which I may be allowed to select one. "The most common form of cultivation (among the Kachin of Upper Burma) is the wasteful process of hill-clearing. The method employed is to select an untouched hill slope, fell the jungle about March and let it lie on the ground till it is thoroughly dry. This is set fire to in June or July, and the surface of the earth is broken up with a rude hoe, so as to mix in the wood ashes. The sowing is of the roughest description. The worker dibbles away with the hoe in his right hand and throws' in a grain or two with his left. The crop is left to take care of itself till it is about a foot high, when it is weeded, and again weeded before the crop gets ripe. The crop is usually reaped about October. The same field cannot be reaped two years running. Usually it has to lie fallow from seven to ten years where the jungle does not grow rapidly, and from four to seven years where the growth is quicker." l At the present day, the tribal differences which once prevailed be- tween hoe and plough culture have disappeared to a large extent, though not so much as to escape the eye of a keen observer, and the difference now chiefly rests on economic grounds, as can be seen from the example of Siam where rice is grown in hoe-culture on the rude hills, and by the methods of agriculture on the fertile plains by the same population; the poor hill-people being simply forced to their mode of life by sheer economic necessity. Thus, also, numerous low-class Chinese who took refuge among the wild tribes of the mountains descended to their style of husbandry as an easier manipulation, and the poor colonists on the banks of the Yellow River met with by Mr. Rockhill must have been in a similar condition of wretchedness, for what they did was nothing but a relapse into hoe-culture. From their use of the stone mattock as observed by Mr. Rockhill, — and we shall see later on in another con- nection that stone mattocks have been in use for this purpose through- out the south-east of Asia, — we are justified in concluding that the stone mattock is the mattock employed in hoe-culture, and further that also the ancient stone mattocks found in Shensi and Shantung must have been associated with hoe-culture. It follows from an historical consideration of this subject that these stone mattocks are to be attrib- uted to a non-Chinese population which lived there before the invasion of the Chinese and was gradually absorbed by them, rather than to the Chinese themselves. All the specimens from Shantung have been apparently turned to practical purposes; nearly all of them show traces of having been used. The two rectangular chisels illustrated in Plate X fairly agree in shape 1 Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, Vol. I, Part I, p. 424 (Rangoon, 1900). This is one of their methods, but in other regions wherever they learned from their Shan and Chinese neighbors, wet paddy cultivation, i.e. agriculture, has been introduced among them. 50 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. with those of Shensi and show the same straight cutting edge, with slightly rounded, beveled corners in Fig. i, where we find also the convex lateral edges. Figure 2 on Plate XI exhibits a similar type, only that the blade is much broader here. The hammer in Fig. 1 of Plate XI is particularly interesting as revealing the stone prototype of the carpenter's iron hammer common all over China. The blade starts from about the middle of the stone and gradually slopes on both faces towards the cutting edge. In Fig. 3 of the same Plate the back is oval-shaped, and the blade does not occupy the entire front part, but is cut out in the way of an arch; the cutting edge is round. Fig. 4, Plate XI, evi- dently belongs to the same type, but the blade is much weathered out. The five stone objects united on Plate XII seem to be pestles for pounding grain, with exception of Fig. 5. This is a rough fragment of black pebble flattened on one side and marked with a small circle on the top; it was not found like the other stones near Ts'ing-chou fu, but it came into the possession of Mr. Couling by purchase, its origin not being known; I do not venture any theory in regard to its possible use. The greatest surprise among the stone implements of Shantung is afforded by the find of a grooved axe or hammer of diorite (Plate XIII, Fig. 1), 9 cm long and 6 cm wide, with a deeply furrowed groove run- ning all around, about 2 cm wide. It is the first and the only known type of this kind from China, and of particular interest to us, because it is a type very widely spread in North America.1 The Chinese specimen is better worked than any from America known to me and exhibits a remarkable regularity and proportion of form, that same sense for dimension which elicits our admiration in their most ancient productions of pottery, metal or stone. There is a ridge-like projection over one side of the groove. As this type stands alone in the Chinese field, according to our present state of knowledge, and is generally of greatest rarity in Asia, it will be appropriate to determine its position by calling attention to finds of a related character in other regions. Only one of this type, as far as I know, has become known from India. It was found at Alwara, two miles north of the Jumna, and thirty-seven miles south- west of Allahabad by Mr. J. Cockburn, placed together with a number of other stones under a sacred tree. It was figured and described by 1 The Chinese specimen comes nearest to that figured by Th. Wilson in Report of National Museum, 1888, p. 647, No. 72. — Different from this type are the grooved globular clubs of Scandinavia as described by Sophus Muller (Nordische Alter- tumskunde, Vol. I, p. 144), which, however, seem to be plummets or sinkers (compare Wilson, I. c, p. 653, Nos. 107, 108). - Explanation of Pl. XIII. Fig. i. Grooved Diorite Axe from Shantung Province, in British Museum, London. Fig. 2. Grooved Quartz Axe from India, in British Museum, London. After Rivett-Carnac. Fig. 3. Grooved Stone Hammer from Saghalin. After Iijima. Fig. 4. Grooved Stone Hammer of the Chukchi. After Bogoras. FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. X, PL. XIII. Grooved Stone Axes. Feb., 1912. Jade. 51 J. H. Rivett-Carnac,1 after whom it is here reproduced on Plate XIII, Fig. 2, a and b (upper and lower faces). The original is now preserved in the British Museum. It is 13 cm long and 6.5 cm wide. Rivett- Carnac describes it as made of a tough, grayish quartzite, somewhat resembling a modern hammer in form, being flat at the ends and slightly curved on the upper surface. A groove has been carefully carried round the centre. The base has been hollowed out with equal care in a gouge-like form. The whole arrangement suggests that the hammer was attached by a ligature to a wooden or withy handle, the ligature being kept in its place by the upper groove, while the lower groove held the hammer in position on the rounded haft. Mr. Cockburn has pointed out certain minute marks, especially on the lower groove, which suggest the possibility of metal implements having been used in the fashioning of the hammer, and it may be that this implement belongs to the transition stage from stone to metal, when metal, though available, was scarce. This specimen is believed, concludes the author, to be the first of this description found in India; he adds that his col- lection contains several other grooved hammers of a less perfect form, bearing no trace of metallic tooling, which appear to be water-worn pebbles grooved to admit of being attached to a withy handle. Figure 3 on Plate XIII2 shows a grooved stone hammer found in a shell-mound north-west of Korsakovsk on the southern shore of Saghalin Island by Dr. Iijima. N. G. Munro (Prehistoric Japan, p. 140, No. 1, Yokohama, 1908) has figured a similar type from Japan, without defining the locality of the find, but he diagnoses it as a sinker,3 with the remark: "This stone is sometimes described as a hammer, but those that I have seen are made of rather friable lava and would not stand much concussion. I have more than once seen these objects placed on tomb-stones, in fishing localities." I do not believe that this supposition is correct, but think that Mr. Edward S. Morse (Shell Mounds of Omori, p. 15, and Plate XVII, 1-2, Tokyo, 1879) who has discovered two grooved hammers in these shell-mounds of Ainu origin is perfectly right in identifying them as hammers, and in saying "it is hardly probable that they were intended for net sinkers." Farther north-east, we find the grooved stone hammer in modern times as a common household utensil among the Chukchi (Plate 1 On Stone Implements from the North Western Provinces of India, p. 6 (Cal- cutta, 1883). 2 Derived from the Journal of the Anthrop. Soc. of Tokyo, Vol. XXI, No. 247, 1906. 3 Doubtless prompted by J. Evans, Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain, p. 236 (Second ed., London, 1897). 52 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. XIII, Fig. 4). It is a maul oblong in shape with a groove all around in about the lower third of the stone, to which a short wooden or bone perforated haft is tied by means of strong leashings. It is especially used for splitting marrow-bones to extract the marrow, also for break- ing all kinds of bones from which tallow is to be extracted, and for crushing frozen meat, fish and blubber. The crushing is done over a large flat round stone.1 Gerard Fowke2 has devoted a chapter to the description of grooved axes in North America which, according to him, seem to be of general distribution throughout the United States, being, as far as can be learned from various writers, much more numerous east of the Missis- sippi River than west of it. But he is inclined to think that no deduc- tions can be made concerning their relative abundance or scarcity, as collectors have more diligently searched in the east than in the west. The grooved stone hammer does not survive in any other object in modern China ; its unique occurrence in one specimen in the times of antiquity seems to show that it takes a rather exceptional position. The finds of this type in shell-mounds of Saghalin and Japan which must be connected with the culture of the Ainu inhabiting this region, in addition to the live tradition of the Chukchi, prove that it belongs to the Palae-asiatic, or as I prefer to say, North-Pacific culture-area. And the Chuckchi on Bering Strait present the natural stepping-stone linking it with the American continent. Coincidences in material objects as well as in ideas underlying myths and traditions finally rest on historical causes. Nobody competent to judge will deny at present that there have been mutual historical influences between Asia and America revealed by numerous indications, steadily growing as our knowledge advances. I am not an advocate of the theory that American cultures in their whole range are derived from Asia; there was a continuous undisturbed indigenous development going on for ages on this continent with a keynote of striking originality which cannot be explained by Asiatic ideas. On the other hand, human ideas have never been stationary, but mobile and constantly on the path of migration. Ideas have poured in from Asia into America, and from America into Asia, in a process of mutual fertilization. The grooved stone axe may well be claimed as an autochthonous product of North America; there it occurs in greatest abundance and in a number of variations. It occurs 1 A. E. v. Nordenskiold, Die Umsegelung Asiens und Europas, Vol. II, p. 1 1 1 (Leipzig, 1882) and W. Bogora,s, The Chukchee I, Material Culture, p. 187 (Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VII, 1904), from whom our illustration is borrowed. 2 Stone Art in XHIth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 62-72. Compare also Moorehead, The Stone Age of North America, Vol. I, pp. 222 et seq., 287 et seq. (Boston, 1910). Feb., 1912. Jade. 53 on this side of1 and beyond Bering Strait as an every day household object, but otherwise sporadically only in Eastern Asia. Each case must be pursued individually, and attempts at premature generaliza- tion be suppressed, as very well outlined by O. T. Mason.2 In other archaeological types, America may have borrowed from Asia as e. g. the stone weights from Lower Columbia Valley3 whose shapes and peculiar handles agree with the Chinese bronze weights of theTs'in dynasty (b. c. 246-207). It would be a premature venture to attempt to set a date for the stone implements discovered in Ts'ing-chou fu. The material is too scanty to allow of far-reaching conclusions. It is clearly distinguished in its character as surface-finds from the mortuary specimens of Shensi. Internal evidence might lead one to attribute a comparatively higher age to the Shantung stone implements, but such evidence based on considerations of this kind is often fallacious. There is no doubt that the types represented by them are older, but even this granted, the actual specimens under view may notwithstanding come down from a later period, because we have as yet no clue as to the time when the manufacture of such implements ceased in Shantung. The question as to the identification of these stone implements with a Chinese or a non-Chinese culture, though it cannot be definitely solved at present, yet may be approached on the supposition that they are much more likely to have been produced by a non-Chinese tribe than by the Chinese. As regards the type of the mattock, culture-historical considera- tions switched us on the same track. The history of Shantung furnishes proof that the Chinese settlers struck there, as in other territories, an aboriginal population of whose culture we can unfortu- nately form no clear idea from the ancient meagre records. The region of Ts'ing-chou, from which our stone implements are derived, is said to have been inhabited by a tribe called Shuang-kiu under the Emperor Shao-hao, whose time is dated traditionally at the 26th century b. c. Subsequently, the tribes Ki-sh§ and P'u-ku take their place, — whether these names simply denote a change of the former name or a new current of immigration, we do not know. The Ki-she belong to the time of the Emperor Shun and the Hia dynasty (approximately b. c. 23d-ioth century). At the end of the Shang dynasty (b. c. 1 1 54), the P'u ku were counted among the feudal states of China; 1 For Alaska see, e. g., A. P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska {Report of U. S. Nat. Mus., 1888, Plate XXI). 2 Migration and the Food Quest (Smithsonian Report jor 1894, pp. 538-539). 3 Harlan I. Smith in American Anthropologist, 1906, p. 305. 54 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. Ch'eng Wang, the second ruler of the Chou dynasty (b. c. ii 15-1078) put an end to their rule, when they rebelled against him. At the time of the Emperor Yii (alleged to have lived about b. c. 2200), two bar- barous tribes are mentioned in the eastern part of Shantung, the Yii living around the Shantung promontory, and the Lai who subsisted on cattle-rearing and left their name in the present Lai-chou fu.1 There is no record to the effect that any of these tribes availed itself of stone implements, but there is little on record regarding them any- way. The choice is only between the Chinese and the primeval popula- tion, and the fact that the latter has existed there before the arrival of the Chinese cannot well be doubted. As the Chinese, when settling and spreading in Shantung, were in the possession of metal and bronze implements and are silent about the use of stone implements on their part, it may be assumed with a tolerable degree of certainty that the stone implements of Ts'ing-chou have emanated from the hands of aboriginal man. In reviewing the whole material as presented here, we may draw from it the following conclusions: (1) All stone implements so far found in China are polished, many of them elaborately and elegantly polished. Therefore, they belong to that class which, as far as prehistoric Europe, Egypt, India and America are concerned, has been styled neolithic. No stone of palae- olithic and eolithic character has as yet come to light in China. (2) These implements are found scattered in certain parts of the country and are generally scarce. There are two groups as to the character of the finds noticeable, — finds on or immediately beneath the surface or in river-beds, and grave-finds. The former are more primitive and rougher in technique, the latter of much superior work- manship. Whether, a chronological difference exists between the two, it is hard for the present to say; they may have been contemporaneous, after all, the one for the practical use of the living generation, the others for ceremonial and funeral purposes. Local and tribal differentiations have to be equally taken into account in this connection. (3) Chisels, hammer-shaped axes, and mattocks are the prevailing types thus far discovered. (4) No deposits of stone implements, so-called work-shops, have as yet been found anywhere in China which would allow the conclusion that man, without the aid of any metal, depended solely on stone utensils at any time, or that a stone industry for the benefit of a large 1 Shu king, Tribute of Yii 6, 7. Chavannes, Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. I, p. 113. I do not wish to refer my readers to F. v. Richthofen's Schantung (pp. 87 et seq.) on account of his obvious errors, as known to the initiated (compare Hirth, Schantung und Kiau-tschou in Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1898, Nos. 218 and 219, where an able history of eastern Shantung is given, utilized for the above notes). Feb., 191 2. Jade. 55 local population was carried on to any extent. It is therefore, in the present state of our knowledge, not justifiable to speak of a stone age of China, and still less, as we shall see from a consideration of native records, of a stone age of the Chinese. (5) The stone implements thus far found need not be credited with any exaggerated age, nor is the term "prehistoric" applicable to them. This term is not absolute, but denotes a certain space of time in a rela- tive sense requiring a particular definition for each culture area, and varying according to the extent in time of historical monuments and records. The burial of jade implements was much practised during the historical period of the Chou dynasty (b. c. 1122-249) an(i con_ tinued down to the epoch of the two Han dynasties (b. c. 206-221 a. d.). While the jade implements in our collection come down from the Chou period, though in regard to some it may be fairly admitted that they are comparatively older, this does not certainly mean that jade or stone implements sprang up at just that time. Their forms and conventional make-up undeniably show that they are traceable to older forms of a more realistic and less artistic character. This pri- meval age of stone implements, however, can only be reconstructed artificially on the basis of internal evidence furnished by objects of a more recent epoch, or in other words, it remains an hypothesis, an assumption evolved from logical conclusions of our mind, pure and simple. It is not a fact, by any means, but an idea. The substantial, tangible facts have not yet come to the fore. Turning now to what the Chinese themselves have to say regarding the subject of stone implements, we meet with some allusions to them in the traditions relative to the culture-heroes of the legendary epoch. Shen-nung is credited with having made weapons of stone, and Huang- ti some of jade. This is simply a construction conceived of in later times, without any historical value. In the Tribute of Yii (Yii kung) embodied in the Shu king, one of the oldest documents of Chinese literature, the composition of which may be roughly dated at about b. c. 800, we read twice of stone arrow-heads offered as tribute to the Emperor Yii (alleged about b. c. 2200). The tribes residing in the territory of the present province of Hupeh brought among other objects, metals of three qualities, mill-stones, whetstones, and stones from which to make arrow-heads ; and the tribute of the inhabitants of the province of Liang (in Shensi) consisted in jade for resonant stones, iron, silver, steel, stones from which to make arrow-heads, and ordinary resonant stones.1 It appears from this account that these two groups of tribes Compare Shu king ed. Legge, p. 121 ; ed. Couvreur, pp. 73, 77. Cha- vannes, Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. I, pp. 123, 129. G. Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise, P- 758. 56 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. must have been acquainted with and in the possession of metals1 which they offered as tribute; they cannot have lived, therefore, in a true stone period, and the stone arrow-heads must then have been rare and precious objects, otherwise they would not figure in the tribute-list. It is worthy of note that the name for the flint arrow-head appearing for the first time in those two passages is a single word nu (Giles No. 8394) ; the written symbol expressing it is composed of the classifier stone and a phonetic element reading nu. The latter element, again, denotes also "a slave, a servant," so that the original meaning "stone of the slaves" i. e. stone of the subjugated tribes may have been in- strumental in the formation of this character.2 There is further another word nu, — having like the word nu "flint arrow-head" the third tone and therefore perfectly identical with it in sound, — with the meaning of "crossbow," the character being composed of the classifier bow and the same word nu "slave" as phonetic complement. Here, we have accordingly "the bow of the slaves." Now, in the language of the Lolo, an independent aboriginal group of tribes in the mountain-fastnesses of southwestern Sze-ch'uan, the crossbow is called nu,3 and the crossbow is the national weapon not only of the Lolo, but of the whole Man family, the remnants of which are now scattered throughout southern China. I am under the impression that the Chinese derived the crossbow with many other items of culture 1 The metals of three qualities are supposed to be gold, silver and copper. The mention of iron, I believe, is not an anachronism as supposed by Hirth (The Ancient History of China, p. 237); the ancient Chinese certainly knew iron ore and meteoric iron; what they received and learned from the Turks was not simply iron, but a specific method of working iron. 2 1 am well aware of how deceitful such dissections of characters are, and how cautiously any historical conclusions based on such analysis must be taken. The present forms of Chinese characters represent a recent stage of development teeming with alterations and simplifications in comparison with the older forms; many of these changes are due to subsequent reflections on, or modified interpretations of, the ideas associated with the word which they symbolize. Thus, the present way of writing the word nu is possibly only the outcome of an afterthought, but not the original form. The sinological reader may be referred to K'ang-hi's Dictionary where two old forms of this character are given which evidently show no connection with the modern form. I can hardly hope to discuss this question here without the use of Chinese types. 3 Compare Paul Vial, Les Lolos, p. 71 (Shanghai, 1898), who remarks: " Nou, arbalete, ce mot si singulier, si anti-chinois, unique comme son, vient du lolo nou, arbalete, d'autant que cette arme elle-meme n'est pas d'origine chinoise." In his Dictionnaire francais-lolo, p. 27 (Hongkong, 1909), Father Vial gives the word for crossbow in the form nd, which is a dialectic variant based on a regular phonetic alternation between the vowels a and u in the Lolo group of languages. The same vowel-change takes place also in ancient Chinese and in modern Kin-ch'uan (Jya- rung) as compared with Central Tibetan, and plays such an important role in Indo- chinese languages in general that we can speak of A -groups and c^-groups. Feb., 1912. Jade. 57 as e. g. the reed pipe,1 several kinds of dances and songs,2 the well-known bronze drums, from this once powerful and highly organized stock of peoples. In opposition to the prevalent opinion of the day, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough on every occasion that Chinese civiliza- tion, as it appears now, is not a unit and not the exclusive production of the Chinese, but the final result of the cultural efforts of a vast conglomeration of the most varied tribes, an amalgamation of ideas accumulated from manifold quarters and widely differentiated in space and time; briefly stated, this means, China is not a nation, but an empire, a political, but not an ethnical unit. No graver error can hence be committed than to attribute any culture idea at the outset to the Chinese for no other reason than because it appears within the precincts of their empire. At all events, whenever Chinese authors speak of flint arrow-heads, these generally refer to foreign non-Chinese tribes. Especially the Su-shen, a Tungusian tribe akin to the later Niuchi and Manchu, are looked upon by Chinese tradition as typical makers and owners of such arrow-heads. When the Chou dynasty rose in power and ex- tended its influence into the far north-east, the chief of the Su-shen of- fered as tribute arrows provided with stone heads and wooden shafts, one foot eight inches long. The Emperor Wu (b. c. 11 22-1 116) caused the words "Arrow of the tribe Su-shen" to be engraved on the shaft to transmit the matter to posterity. Another tradition tells that, "when Confucius was in the kingdom of Ch'en in b. c. 495, the king took one day his meal on a terrace of his garden, and suddenly a bird pierced by a stone arrow fell down in front of him. Confucius when consulted as to this arrow replied: 'The bird is a sort of sparrow- hawk originating from the land of the Su-shen, and the arrow-head resembles that of the Emperor Wu which he bestowed as an emblem of rank on the prince in whose favor he raised the country of Ch'en into a kingdom.' Thereupon a search was made in the arsenal of the king where in fact the stone arrow-head was found which the princes 1 A musical instrument consisting of a windchest made of gourd with a mouth- piece attached to it, and a series of tubes or pipes, five of which vary in length. An interesting article, with illustrations, on the wind-pipes of the Miao-tse by Ryuzo Torii will be found in No. 169 of the Kokka (June, 1904). 2 The Chou emperors had a special master of ceremonies called mao jSn. Mao is a flag made from the tail of the wild ox which the dancers held in their hands as signals. It was the task of the mao jin to teach the foreign dances with the music accompanying them. All people from the four directions of the compass who had duties at court as dancers were under his command, and in solemn sacrifices and on the occasion of visits of foreign ambassadors, representations of these dances were given. The ancient Chinese furnish the naive explanation that they were adopted to show that all peoples under Heaven form only one empire or family. 58 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. of Ch'en had religiously kept. 'n Though this is no more than an anecdote ben trovato, it may reveal several important points, — that at the time of Confucius flint arrow-heads were no longer generally known, that they were precious rarities preserved in the royal treasury, and that as early as the twelfth century b. c. they had sunk into a mere em- blematic significance and served as insignia of authority,2 and that the Su-shen, a Tungusian tribe, are made responsible for their origin. Chavannes (Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. V, p. 341) quotes a passage from the San kuo chi to the effect that in 262 a. d. the governor of Liao-tung informed the court of the Wei dynasty that the country of the Su-shen had sent as tribute thirty bows, each three feet and five inches long, and three hundred arrows with a point of stone and shaft of the tree hu, one foot and eight inches long. But there is a still later reference to the use of flint arrows on the part of this tribe. As late as the middle of the fifth century a. d. we hear again of the same Su-shen as being in possession of flint arrows, as attested by a passage in the Wei shu, the Annals of the Wei dynasty (386-532 a. d.). Under the year 459 a. d. it is there recorded that the country of Su-shen offered as tribute to the court arrows with wooden shafts and stone heads, and the same tribute is ascribed for the year 488 a. d. to the territory of Ki in the present P'ing-yang fu, Shansi Province. This account offers a twofold interest in showing that flint arrows were then still held in reverence by the Chinese and regarded as valuable objects, and in affording evidence of the long-continued use of flint arrow- heads among the Su-sMn for whom we can thus establish a period spent on their manufacture lasting over a millennium and a half.3 1 G. Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise, pp. 758, 759. This story is derived from the Kuo yii and reproduced in the Annals of Se-ma Ts'ien (see Chavannes' transla- tion, Vol. V, p. 340) where a fuller version of it is given. 2 Bow, arrows and quiver were conferred upon the vassal princes by the emperor as sign of investiture. 3 Palladius discovered in 1870 a stone hatchet near the bay of Vladivostok. He was under the impression that it was made of nephrite; microscopical investiga- tion, however, proved that the substance was diorite-aphanite (H. Fischer, Nephrit und Jadeit, pp. 283-284). Palladius drew from this find a somewhat hazarded con- clusion; he believed that "it would decide the question regarding the famous stone arrow-heads made by the aboriginal inhabitants of Manchuria, the Su-shen, and their direct descendants and successors, the I-lou, Ugi and Mo-ho, from oldest times down to the twelfth century." Palladius evidently labored under the error that the arrow-heads of the Su-shen were of nephrite. There is, however, no account to this effect. All Chinese accounts are unanimous in speaking of these arrow-heads as being of plain stone, and never use the word for jade {yii) in connection with them. The stone hatchet of Vladivostok certainly has no bearing on the whole question, and the further conclusions of Palladius in regard to alleged sites in Manchuria and at the mouth of the Amur where, according to Chinese sources, nephrite should have been found, which is not at all correct, are not valid. I am quite familiar with the Amur region, and having seen a good number of stone implements from there, can positively state that no implements whatever of nephrite have been found there. Feb., 191 2. Jade. 59 The Su-sh£n seem to have been a warlike nation at that time and fought two wars with the Japanese in 658 and 660 a. d., after they had already settled, in 544 a. d., on the island of Sado, west from Hondo where they subsisted on fish-catching. Their relations with Japan are described in the Japanese annals, Nihongi (see Aston, Nihongi, Vol. II, pp. 58, 257, 260, 263, 264). I here allude to them because they contain a passage from which it may be inferred that the Su-shen did not possess iron at that time. In 660 a. d. an expedition of two hun- dred Japanese ships under Abe no Omi with some Ainu on board was despatched against twenty ships of the Su-shen. The Japanese com- mander sent messengers to summon them, but they refused to come. Then he heaped up on the beach colored silk stuffs, weapons, iron, etc., to excite their cupidity. Two old men sent forth by the Su-sMn took these articles away. In the ensuing battle they were defeated, and when they saw during the fight that they could not resist the power of their enemies, put to death their wives and children. "In the country of the I-lou,1 they have bows four feet long. For arrows they use the wood of the tree hu,2 and make them one foot eight inches long. Of a dark (or green) stone they make the arrow-heads, which are all poisoned and cause the death of a man when they hit him.''3 In a small treatise on mineralogy Yiin lin shih p'u, written by Tu Wan in 1133 a. d.,4 is the following note under the heading "Stones for arrow-heads:" "In the district Sin-kan in the prefecture of Lin- kiang in Kiang-si Province, there is a small place called Pai yang kio ("Horn of the white sheep") ten li from the district -town. There is a mountain called Ling-yiin ling, on the summit of which a plain stretches level like a palm. A military out-post was stationed there in ancient times, and everywhere in the land occupied by it, ancient arrows with sharp -pointed blades and knives have been preserved; examining the blades of these knives, it is still possible to cut with them. The material of these arrows and knives consists of stone; 1 A Tungusic or Korean tribe located between the Fu-yii and the Wo-tsu, peoples inhabiting Korea. They are described as resembling in their appearance the Fu-yu, but speaking a different language; they were agriculturists without cattle and sheep, and pig-cultivators; they were not acquainted with iron; they wore armor of skin covered with bone. Compare Plath, Die Volker der Mandschurei, pp. 75-77 (Gottingen, 1830). 2 Bretschneider, Botanicon Sinicum, Part II, No. 543: an unidentified tree. Legge's translation "arrow-thorn" is based on the error that Confucius on one occasion referred to the famous hu arrows; his reference is made only to the shafts being of this wood. Many Chinese editors, from not understanding this word, have changed it in the few passages where it occurs into k'u "decayed tree;" but it is not plausible that rotten wood was ever used for arrow-shafts. 3 Hou Han shu, Tung I chuan, quoted in P'ei w$n yiin fu, Ch. 100 A, p. 18. 4 Reprinted in the collection Chih pu tsu chai ts'ung shu, Section 28; Ch. 2, p. 8 b. 60 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. they are over three and four inches in length. There are among them also short ones like those which Confucius under the name § ' stone arrow-heads with wooden shafts' made out as objects of the tribe of Su-shen. [Then follow the quotations from the Yii kung above re- ferred to.] In the Ch'un Ts'iu period ( b. c. 722-481) they were collected in the palace of the state of Ch'en in such a way that the wooden shafts were perforated and strung; the stone arrow-head of these was one foot and eight inches long. There are, further, stone coats-of-mail consisting of scales ("leaves") like tortoise-shells,1 but somewhat thicker. There are stone axes as big as a palm, the wooden hafts of which have been pierced to enable convenient carrying. They are all dark (or green) colored and hard; when struck, they emit sounds." Ch'ang K'u, the author of ancient records relating to Sze-ch'uan (Hua yang kuo chi) written at the time of the Tsin dynasty (265-313 a. d.) mentions stone arrow-heads in the district of T'ai-teng (Sze- ch'uan Province), on a mountain situated on a lake Ma hu ("Horse Lake") into which a small river Sun shut or Pai sha kiang ("White- sand River") falls. "When these arrow-heads are burnt by fire, they will harden like iron."2 Johan Neuhoff (Die Gesantschaft der Ost-Indischen Gesellschaft, p. 318, Amsterdam, 1669) tells of a peculiar kind of stone found on the mountain Tiexe near K'ien-kiang in Sze- ch'uan; when heated by fire, iron pours out of them well suited for sabres and swords. In the great archaeological work edited by the two brothers Feng in 1822, the Kin-shih so {kin so, Vol. 2), three stone arrow-points with inscriptions are published (reproduced in Fig. 8) . In the upper one on the left an ancient form of the character yu "right" is engraved, in the one on the right the symbols for the two numerals "eight" and "thousand;" in the lower arrow-head the character Vung "together" appears in relief,3 while the lower, face of the same specimen figured beside it is without character. The Chinese editors do not express an opinion in regard to the meaning of these symbols ; maybe they merely take the place of property marks, if they are not, which is even worse, collectors' marks only. I hardly believe that they originated contem- 1 The Shih i ki written by Wang Kia in the fourth century records: "In the first year of the period T'ai shih (265 a. d.) of the Tsin dynasty, men of the country of Pin-se came to court with clothing adorned with jade in five colors, in the style of the present coats-of-mail (i. e. jade plaques were fastened to the coat as metal plaques in an armor). Further the country of Po-ti presented a ring of black jade in color resembling lacquer." 2 Quoted in P'ei wen yiinfu, Ch. 100 A, p. 29 b. 3 As shown by its black color in the reproduction, whereas the two others are white. The illustrations were made from rubbings of the specimens. Feb., 1912. Jade. 61 fi * >m *** 1 <^r ^L T "t s. * 4i * * *t '« 7, *# ^ >L ,0 ^4: J^ *c ^ -3 If PI Fig. 8. Three Stone Arrow-Heads (from Kin-shih so). 62 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. poraneously with these arrow-heads. There is no testimony that the Chinese themselves ever made practical use of flint arrows, and if we want to suppose such a period in their culture, it must certainly be far back in times antedating the invention of writing. It will therefore be more reasonable to argue that these flint arrow-heads were inciden- tally found by Chinese, and that some one with antiquarian tastes had these characters engraved in them. This would not be an unprec- edented case, for there are numerous examples for such procedures. Especially in the K'ien-lung period (173 6- 1795) when a mania for antique scripts broke out, numberless genuine ancient objects fell victims to this fashion and were covered with date-marks and other inscriptions of archaic style. Bronze swords and other weapons, tiles, and jades were the favorite objects of such improvement, so that this period is apt to become the crux of the archaeologist. The text of the editors says: "Arrow-heads with points of stone and inscribed. They are certainly objects of great rarity {lit. not easily seen or found). The two upper specimens were obtained by Yeh Tung-k'ing; the one below by Kuei Wei-ku in Ming-fu (ancient name for Ning-po)." As shown by the black ink, the reproductions were made by means of rubbings and accordingly teach nothing about the character of the surface of the specimens; we only receive a glimpse of their outlines which are presumably correct. We are surprised at the gracefully elegant shapes of the two upper specimens, as are rarely, if at all, found in flint arrow-heads; they convey the impression that they are imitations of bronze arrow-heads, to which also the long tangs seem to point. Indeed, when glancing over the pages of the Kin-shih so, I had many times taken these illustrations for bronze arrow-heads, until the reading of the editorial comment convinced me of my error. The twin tips in the upper specimen on the right are also striking, and I am not aware of any analogous example to this phenomenon in other flint arrows. The lower specimen seems to be a lance-head rather than an arrow-head. The two brothers Feng were immensely capable and ingenious archaeologists, and it would be unfair to suspect that they became the victims of a mystification in this case. While I am inclined to regard the characters as epigone additions,1 I think of the objects themselves as authentic, but as having been made in a bronze period as reproductions of bronze arrow-heads presumably for use as amulets, as far as the first two are concerned. As regards stone hatchets, we saw them mentioned by Tu Wan in 1 133 a. d. But there are some earlier records of such finds. 1 These are not forgeries in Chinese estimation, but improvements or embellish- ments. Feb., 191 2. Jade. 63 In the fourth year of the period Ta-ming (460 a. d.) the governor of Su-chou,1 Liu Tao, descended into the river Pien and found a hatchet of white jade which he presented to the Emperor.2 During the reign of the Emperor Su-tsung (756-762 a. d.) of the T'ang dynasty, a Buddhist priest, Ni-chen-ju by name, made a present to the Emperor of eight precious objects which he alleged to have received from Heaven for transmission to the Son of Heaven. The sixth of these was styled "Stones of the God of Thunder." It consisted of two pieces having the shapes of hatchets, about four inches long and over an inch wide; they were not perforated and hard like green jade.3 Tuan Ch'eng-shih, the author of the Yu yang tsa tsu, who died in 863 a. d., mentions stone axes occurring in a river in the district of I-tao which is the ancient name for I-tu in King-chou fu, Hupeh; some of them as big as ordinary (copper) axes, others small like a peck {tou).' It seems that actual use of primitive jade axes was still made at the court of the Mongol emperors in Peking; for, as Palladius 5 pointed out, T'ao Tsung-i who wrote the interesting work Ch'o keng lu at the close of the Yuan dynasty, mentions two life-guards standing next to the Khan who held in their hands " natural" axes of jade. Palladius adds that they were axes found fortuitously in the ground, probably primitive weapons. Li Shih-chen, the great naturalist of the sixteenth century, summed up the knowledge of his time regarding ancient stone imple- ments in his Pen ts'ao kang mu (Section on Stones, Ch. 10) as follows. He comprises them under the generic term p'i-li chen (or ts'en) which means " stones6 originating from the crash of thunder." Before giving his own notes, he quotes Ch'en Tsang-k'i, the author of a Materia medica under the T'ang dynasty in the first half of the eighth century as saying: "Suchlike objects have been found by people who explored a locality over which a thunderstorm had swert, and dug three feet in the ground. They are of various shapes. There are those resem- bling choppers and others like files. There are some pierced with two 1 In Kiang-su Province. 1 Sung shu, fujui chi (quoted in P'ei wen yun fu, Ch. 100 A, p. 213 a). 3 G. Schlegel, /. c, p. 760. * Quoted in P'ei wen ytinfu, Ch. 100 A, p. 30 b. s Elucidations of Marco Polo's Travels in North-China (Journal China Branch R. Asiatic Society, Vol. X, 1876, p. 43). 6 The word chen (Giles No. 626) is properly a flat smooth stone block as occurring on the bank of a river or brook used by women to beat clothes on when washing them. Li Shih-chen remarks that of old this word was written with the character chin meaning "needle" (Giles No. 615) "which is an insignificant mistake;" but maybe stone needles really existed in ancient times. 64 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. holes. Some say that they come from Lei-chou in Kuang-tung1 and from Tsi-chou fu in Shansi (Ho tung shan) where they have been found after a storm with lightning and thunder. Many resemble an axe. They are dark (or green) in color with black streaks and hard like jade. It is stated by several that these are stone implements made by man and presented to the celestial deities, a matter the truth of which 1 ignore." Now Li Shih-chen himself takes the word: "The Book on Light- ning (Lei shu) says: 'The so-called thunder-axes are like ordinary axes made of copper or iron. The thunder washing-blocks (lei chen) resemble those of stone in real use; they are purple and black in color. The thunder hammers weigh several catties. The thunder gimlets are over a foot in length, and are all like steel. They have been used by the God of Thunder in splitting things open or in striking objects. The thunder rings are like jade rings; these have been worn as girdle- ornaments by the God of Thunder and have subsequently fallen down. The thunder beads are those which the divine dragon (shen lung) had held in its mouth and dropped. They light the entire house at night.' — In the Po wu chi (a work by Chang Hua, 232-300 a. d.) it is said: 'Fine stones in the shape of small axes are frequently seen among the people. They are styled axes of the crash of thunder (pH-li fu) or wedges of the crash of thunder (p'i-li hieh).' — In the Hiiian chung ki (by Kuo-shih of the fifth century) it is narrated: 'West of Yii-men (near Tun-huang, Kansu) there is a district with a mountain on which a temple is erected. There the people of the country annually turn out gimlets to offer to the God of Thunder as a charm against lightning. This is a false practice, for thunder partakes of the two forces of Yin and Yang (the female and male power) and has accordingly a loud and a low voice, so that it can produce in fact divine objects (shen wu). Thus, numerous objects come to light out of hidden places, like axes, gimlets, washing-stones, hammers, which are all real things.2 If it is said that in Heaven conceptions arise, and that on earth forms arise,3 we have an example in stars falling down on earth and being stones there. And so it happens that it rains metal and stone, millet and wheat, hair and blood, and other queer things assuming shape on earth. There are certainly in the universe (lit. the great void) divine 1 The name Lei-chou means Thunder-City. Whether it received this name from the finds of thunder-stones, or whether it is credited with the latter for the sake of its name, I cannot decide. The God of Thunder is much worshipped in that pre- fecture (Hirth, Chinesische Studien, p. 140; Cl. Madrolle, Hai-nan et la cote con- tinental voisine, p. 79, Paris, 1900). 2 Compare Memoires concernant les Chinois, Vol. IV, p. 474. 3 Quotation from Yi king. Feb., 1912. Jade. 65 objects which can be utilized. There was, e. g., Su Shao at the time of the Ch'6n dynasty (557-587 a. d.) who had a thunder hammer weighing nine catties. At the time of the Sung (960-1278 a. d.), there lived Shen Kua1 who found during a thunder-storm under a tree a thunder wedge resembling an axe, but not perforated. The actions of the spirits are dark and cannot indeed be fully investi- gated." It will be seen that Li Shih-chen does not divulge his own opinion on the subject, but is content with citing his predecessors. We notice that the almost universal belief in thunderbolts presumably suggested by falls of meteors and shooting-stars prevails also in China.2 Fig. 9 is reproduced from the Pen ts'ao and exhibits six sketches in outline of implements mentioned in the article,3 — from left to right explained as wedge, axe, gimlet, inkcake, pellet, and washing-stone, the latter rather looking like a club than an anvil. Regarding the so-called inkcake, Li Shih-chen has the following additional remark: "The Book on Lightning (Lei shu) says: 'Every lightning writes in wood and stone which are then called wooden writing-tablets (mu cha) . The writing is two or three-tenths of an inch deep of dark-yellow hue. Others say that flowers of sulphur, indigo-blue and vermilion are com- bined in the writing of the documents of lightning. Again, others say that it is grease from the stones of Mount P'eng-lai to furnish this 51 n. m # 4t 8 fl 5 1 A. tt • O (S Fig. 9. Stone Implements (from Pin ts'ao kang mu). lThe author of the Ming ki pi fan who lived from 1030 to 1093 (Giles, Biogra- phical Dictionary, No. 1691). He expresses himself in this book as follows: "The people of the present time have found numerous thunder hatchets and thunder wedges, in all cases, after a thunderstorm. Of the thunder hatchets, many are made of iron and copper; the wedges are of stone and resemble hatchets, but are not perforated." 2R. Andree (Ethnographische Parallelen, Neue Folge, pp. 30-41) offers a series of notes on the propagation of this idea. — The term thunderbolt is not limited to stone implements, but is also applied to those of bronze. In 1902 I obtained two bronze spear-heads and three bronze chisels excavated near the ancient city of Shao-hing in Chekiang Province through Mr. Gilbert Walshe (see Journal China Branch R. Asiatic Society, Vol. XXXIII, p. 92). In a letter, dated Shanghai, June 31, 1902, Mr. Walshe then remarked: "The so-called thunderbolts are, I imagine, really bronze chisels of a bronze age, — I will not say the bronze age, — and are said to be found buried in the earth some three feet beneath the spot where a man has been struck by 'thunder' (according to the Chinese ideas)." 3 Reproduced also by F. de Mely, Les pierres de foudre chez les Chinois et les Japonais {Revue archeologique, 1895, p. 5 of the reprint) and Les lapidaires chinois, p. LV. 66 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. writing-material. In Lei-chou every thunderstorm is connected with a big downpour of rain in which large objects like sandstones fly down and small ones like bits of stones, others in the shape of fingers, hard like stone, of black color, lustrous and very heavy.' — Liu Sun says in his book Ling piao lu (T'ang dynasty): 'In Lei-chou, after a rain, men have frequently found in desert places stones like jet1 which they call inkcakes of the God of Thunder; when struck, they yield a sound like metal; they are of bright lustre and nice.' — Li Chao narrates in his book Kuo shih pu (beginning of ninth century): 'Thunderstorms abound in Lei-chou. At the advent of the autumn they cease, and it looks as if thunder would then hibernate in the soil. The people dig it up, take and eat it, and in view of this fact, such objects appear as the fruits of thunder.' "2 These "inkcakes" are doubtless natural productions, and not wrought stone. Soft stones available for writing with are frequently mentioned. Johan Neuhof (Die Gesantschaft der Ost-Indischen Gesellschaft, p. 317, Amsterdam, 1669) alludes to a stone found near Nan-hing in Kuang-tung Province "very similar in color to Chinese ink, by means of which the Chinese write on white polished boards in the same manner as Europeans with chalk." The thunder stones have also an artistic or ornamental function in a curious wood-engraving inserted in the Fang-shih mo p'u (published in 1588) and here reproduced in Fig. 10. Six so-called "precious objects of good omen" are there united in a circular zone on a back- ground of cloud-ornaments. On the right side, two hatchets will be recognised which are explained as "thunder stones." The other objects are: below, two hooks by means of which the empress cuts the leaves of the mulberry -tree,3 a jade seal, beads of the white coral called lang-kan? the red jewel called mo-ho, and the precious pearl granting every wish. Li Shih-chen refers in another passage also to acupuncture needles having been made of stone in ancient times. They are called pien shih (Giles No. 9194) or chen shih (No. 610). His note runs as follows: 1 See Laufer, Historical Jottings on Amber in Asia, pp. 222-225. 2In the Wu It siao shih by Fang I-chih (Hirth, T'oung Pao, Vol. VI, p. 428) it is said that thunder assumes the shape of a swine in the ground. Hirth (Chinesi- sche Studien, p. 158) thinks that a plant like a truffle is understood. 3 This is an ingenious instrument combining the two functions of a hook and a cutter. Those which I have seen in central China were in the shape of a small scythe to the back of which a projecting hook is attached. The instrument is provided with a socket into which a long bamboo stick is inserted. The farmer uses the hook to seize and bend down towards himself the branches of the mulberry-tree, ' and when they are within easy reach, he cuts them off with the scythe-like knife. 4 See Chavannes, T'oung Pao, 1907, p. 182; Forke, Mitteilungen des Seminars, Vol. VII, 1904, p. 148. Feb., 1912. Jade. 67 "The Tung shan king says: 'The mountains of Kao-shih and Fu-li abound in the stone for acupuncture needles.' Kuo P'o (276-324 a. d.) remarks in his commentary to the dictionary Erh-ya that instead of pien also chen can be written. — The medical work Su wen i fa fang i lun says: 'In the regions of the eastern quarter there is a place where salt is fished from the sea. The water along the beach of the sea is Fig. 10. Stone Hatchets in Ornamental Composition (from Fang-skih mo p'u). wholesome in the cure of sores and ulcers and conveys its beneficial effects to the acupuncture stones; hence the latter come also from the eastern region. — Wang Ping, a physician of the eighth century, states in his commentary (to the Huang-ti su wen): 'The stones called pien are like jade and may be called also needles (chin). The ancients made the acupuncture needles of stone; the more recent generations substituted iron for the stone. The people of the present time use a porcelain needle to perform acupuncture on the same principle derived from the stone needles. Only we do not know any longer the stone 68 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. used in acupuncture (no specimens having come down to us), but it may be supposed that it belonged to the class of stone from which arrow-heads were made.' "* In some localities, "stones of the Thunder-God" of special fame are pointed out. Thus, e. g., according to the Imperial Geography (Ta TsHng i t'ung chi), there is in the north-west of the city of Nan- feng in Kiang-si Province a summit in the shape of a lotus-flower {Lien hua feng) , on the top of which there is a stone of the Thunder- God. Also the Emperor K'ang-hi shows himself familiar with thunder- bolts in his Jottings on Natural Science (translated in Memoires con- cernant les Chinois, Vol. IV, p. 474, Paris, 1779); he says that their shapes and materials vary according to the localities, and that the nomadic Mongols, whereby he understands Mongols proper and Tungusians on the eastern sea-coasts, avail themselves of such im- plements in the manner of copper and steel; some are shaped like hatchets, others like knives, and some like mallets, some of blackish, and others of greenish color. It is a favorite idea inferred a priori that stone implements must be infinitely old and called prehistoric. For stone implements found on Chinese soil at least, this is merely illusory, as we have trustworthy historical accounts relating to the manufacture of such implements in comparatively recent time. Thus, e. g., it is recorded in the geo- graphical work Huan yii ki written by Lo Shi at the end of the tenth century that the people in the present locality of T'eng hien (in Wu- chou fu, Kuang-si Province) manufacture knives and swords of a dark-colored (or green) stone (tsHng.shih) of which their women turn out armlets and rings; with the former, it takes the place of iron and copper, with the latter of pearls and gems.2 This notice would become one of importance, if stone objects of this description would ever turn up in that district which, without any additional evidence, would have to be dated in the tenth century a. d. There are even still more recent accounts of stone implements actually manufactured. Johan Neuhof (Die Gesantschaft der Ost- Indischen Gesellschaft, p. 317, Amsterdam, 1669) mentions the occur- rence near the city of Nan-hing in Kuang-tung Province of a kind of stones so hard that the inhabitants can make from them hatchets and 1 Then follows a note concerning flint arrow-heads which it is not necessary to reproduce, as we are familiar with its contents. It is, however, interesting to see that to Li Shih-chdn the flint arrow-heads come only from the country of the Su-sh6n. 2 The same account is given also in the Pen ts'ao kang mu (Section on Stones, Ch. 10, p. 36b) where the clause is added: "The people of that district, in bringing a field under cultivation, use a knife (i. e. mattock) made of stone and over a foot long." Feb., 1912. Jade. 69 knives. The statement of the same tenor made by Grosier (De- scription generate de la Chine, Vol. I, p. 191, Paris, 18 18) seems to go back to that source.1 There is, in my opinion, not the faintest reason to connect these modern manufactures with the idea of a stone age or even to consider them as survivals; they are merely the outcome of chance and convenience. Hundreds of utensils are turned out of stone by the Chinese, so that there is no wonder that occasionally and sporad- ically also a knife or a hatchet is listed among these objects, when a suitable material offers. After having surveyed the existing material and the records of the Chinese, it may be well to go back to the assertion which several authors have made in regard to a stone age of China, some very positively, others more guardedly by merely pointing to the possibility of this case. In view of the scanty material before them, there is certainly occasion to admire the courage of such writers. As early as 1870, Edward T. Stevens (Flint Chips, p. 116) who knew of just one stone adze from China exhibited in the Christy Collection, London, wrote: "St. Julien has extracted passages from different Chinese works which prove the existence of a stone age in China. Not only are arrow-heads and hatchets of stone noticed, but also agricultural implements made of the same material." Julien can hardly be made responsible for these notes which consist of four brief and incomplete references; they were communicated by him to Chevreul who published them under the title "Note historique sur l'age de pierre a la Chine" (Comptes rendus de V Academie des Sciences, Vol. LXIII, pp. 281-285, Paris, 1866). But as one swallow does not make a summer, one stone adze does not yet go to make a stone age, and four literary allusions of recent date do not help much to support it. R. Andree (Die Metalle bei den Naturvolkern, p. 103, Leipzig, 1884) says: "However early and highly developed the knowledge of metals appears among the Chinese, yet this people does not make an exception and has had like all other peoples a stone period; it even seems that in some provinces stone implements were used in compara- tively recent times." Andree justly calls attention to the aborigines in the south and south-west among whom stone implements may have been longest in use. Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, fifth ed., p. 3) is inclined to assume that the use of iron was in China also preceded by bronze, and bronze by stone; and M. Hoernes (Urgeschichte der Menschheit, p. 92) strikes the same note by saying: "The remains of a stone age I The same author (Vol. I, p. 439) asserts: For the rest none of those ancient cutting stones wrought to supplant the use of iron are found in China; at least, the present literati have never heard of such. 70 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. which has passed long ago are preserved in the soil of China; in this great empire, there are provinces where not so long ago axes and cut- ting instruments were made of hard stone," etc. Giglioli (/. c), as shown by the very title of his article, and C. Puini1 have taken the same stand. Prof. Hirth has adopted a special platform (The Ancient History of China, p. 236), and his argument deserves a hearing, as it is based on a discourse of the philosopher Kuan-tse. Hirth believes that "this philosopher was fully conscious of the extent and sequence of cultural periods in high antiquity, knowledge of which, as the result of scientific reasoning, is a comparatively recent acquisition with west- erners." The words of the philosopher are then construed to mean that the time of the primeval emperors (about b. c. 3000) was a stone age in which weapons were made of stone and were used for splitting wooden blocks for the construction of dwellings, and that this first period is followed by a second age extending from about b. c. 2700- 2000 in which jade was used for similar purposes. "This may be compared," adds Hirth, "to our neolithic period, when hatchets and arrow-heads were made of polished stone, either jade or flint." All Chinese philosophers evince a great predilection for evolutionary theorizing which appears as the mere outcome of subjective speculation and cannot stand comparison with the methods and results of our inductive science; deduction there, and induction on this side, make all the difference. It is impossible to assume that the Chinese specula- tors of later days should have preserved the memory of cultural events and developments which must lie back, not centuries, but millenniums before their time. Just the intentional interpretation of an evolution read into the past which looks so pleasant on the surface is the strongest evidence for the fact that this is a purely personal and arbitrary con- struction or invention, not better than the legend of the golden, silver and iron ages. Thus, I cannot agree either with Hirth (/. c, pp. 13, 14) in regarding the traditions clustering around the ancient emperors as symbolizing "the principal phases of Chinese civilization" or their names as "representatives of the preparatory periods of culture." They are, in my opinion, culture-heroes (Heilbringer) of the same type as found among a large number of primitive peoples, downright mythical creations which have no relation whatever to the objective facts of cultural development. Reality and tradition are two different things, and the thread connecting reality with tradition is usually very slender. Nowhere has the history of reality been so evolved as traditional or 1 Le origini della civilta secondo la tradizione e la storia nell' Estremo Oriente, p. 163 (Pubblicazioni del R. Istituto di Studi Superiori, Firenze, 1891). Feb., 1912. Jade. 71 recorded history will make us believe, for it is not only traditions them- selves which in the course of time change and deteriorate, but above all their interpretations and constant re-interpretations in the mind of man. A custom, e. g., may survive at the present time and be practised in exactly the same or a similar manner as thousands of years ago; but another reason for it may be given, another significance attributed to it by modern man. And these explanations of customs, of rites, of traditions, have possibly nothing to do with the objective development of the matter in the world of reality. They are certainly important, but more as folklore or psychological material, while their historical value is small and only relative in that they may be apt to furnish the clue to the correct scientific explanation. Applied to the case under consideration, this means: Kuan-tse's argumentation is certainly interesting as characterizing the intellectual sphere of the man, the trend of his thoughts, and his manner of reasoning, and as furnishing a good example of this mode of Chinese philosophizing; but to make use of it as the foundation of far-reaching conclusions regarding the existence of certain cultural periods is, in my estimation at least, out of the question.1 Such conclusions must be reached by other methods. In weighing the records of the Chinese in the balance of our critique, we are, above all, confronted with the fact that, throughout Chinese literature, there is not one single instance on record in which the Chinese would admit that stone implements like arrow-heads, knives or hatchets have ever been made and used by them in ancient times. In attempt- ing to account for the occasional finds of stone implements, the mere thought that these might have originated from their forefathers, did not even enter their minds. They were strange to them and looked upon with superstitious awe. As far as Chinese history can be tiaced back, we find the Chinese as a nation familiar and fully equipped with metals, copper or bronze, or — copper and bronze, the beating and 1 The same holds good for the culture-periods established by Hirth in his paper Chinesische Ansichten uber Bronzetrommeln, pp. 18-19, on the ground of a passage in the Yiieh tsiieh shu compiled in 52 a. d. and possibly containing views attributable to the fifth century B. c. Also here no historical source is involved from which inferences could be drawn in regard to historical events, but only the theorizing opinion of a philosopher couched in the style of a biblical sermon. According to him, in oldest times, weapons were made of stone to cleave timber for making palaces and houses; the dead were buried by dragons, for God the Lord had so in- tended; up to the time of Huang- ti, weapons were made of jade to fell trees for build- ing houses, and to bore into the soil, for jade was also a divine substance; and as the Lord still intended so, the dead were buried by dragons. In the same stilted lan- guage, with reference to Providence, bronze and iron are treated to conclude the evolutionary series. For lack of all palpable sources, this philosopher was, of course, entirely ignorant of any facts relating to the periods of which he speaks. His utter- ances are philosophy of history, not history. 72 Field Museum or Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. casting of which was perfectly understood. The jade implements of the Chou period are not only contemporaneous with the Chinese bronze age, but also from an epoch when the bronze age after an exist- ence of several millenniums was soon nearing its end and iron gradually began to make its way; i. e. from an archaeological viewpoint, they are recent products. They are not the index of a stone age, and the literary records are in full agreement with this state of affairs. At the time of the Chou, the Chinese lived surrounded by numerous foreign peoples who partially made use of flint arrows and possibly other stone weapons; but also the stock of Man tribes was acquainted with copper and employed copper utensils. The stone implements of their, neighbors were a source of wonder, mere curiosities, to the Chinese. Another notable fact to be gleaned from the references above given is that the association of worked stone with the God of Thunder is a rather late idea and sets in only from times long after the beginning of our era; in all probability, it is not earlier than the T'ang dynasty, for Ch'en Tsang-k'i who lived in the beginning of the eighth century is the first in whom this idea has crystallized (p. 63). We observe that the thunderbolts are not found anywhere and every- where, but that they are restricted to certain localities, among which Lei-chou is prominent. As the Tungusic Su-sheri, from the days of antiquity till the present time, are, in the minds of the Chinese, the typical representatives of flint arrow makers, so the notion of thunder- bolts centers around Lei-chou, the Thunder City. This cannot be accidental. We know that the Chinese have been conquerors and colonists in this territory, and that it was inhabited before their arrival by an aboriginal tribe, the Li, the remnants of which are to be found nowadays in the interior of the island of Hainan.1 During the Sung period (960-1278 a. d.) they were still settled in the prefecture of Lei- chou, as at that time their language is mentioned as one spoken in that locality (Hirth, Chinesische Studien, p. 169). We may safely assume that the stone implements there discovered and not understood by the Chinese must be credited to the Li. And if other regions like Kiang- si and Sze-ch'uan are involved, we have the same state of affairs in that these too were and are still inhabited by non-Chinese tribes; in regard to Yiin-nan, I expressed the same opinion above (p. 32). Generally speaking, wherever in southern China, the land south of the Yangtse, stone implements turn up, there is the greatest probability of their origin being non-Chinese. 1 Regarding this tribe compare Hirth, Die Insel Hainan (Reprint from Bastian- Festschrift, pp. 24 et seq.). Feb., 1912. Jade. 73 The fact that stone implements were once more widely distributed in China than the actual finds hitherto made will allow us to conclude, may be traced from some survivals existing in other forms. We shall meet a number of such survivals in the group of jade symbols which, during the Chou period, were emblems of rank and dignity; part of these are traceable to former implements, as e. g. the imperial emblem of sovereignty to an original hammer. These types will be discussed in the following chapter. By comparing a jade chisel with one of bronze (p. 39), we have made the acquaintance of another kind of survivals, — of stone forms in bronze. Many types of bronze chisels and hatchets bear indeed such a close resemblance to corre- sponding jade objects that the assumption of an historical connection between the two groups is forcibly impressed upon our minds. As the number of such bronze implements in our collection, however, is too large, and this subject would require a long digression into the bronze age, I must leave it here and come back to it in a future mono- graph on these bronze objects. I wish to call attention in this connection only to one type of a stone-form survival in bronze which thus far has become known to us in China only in this material, but whose origin most probably goes back to an older form in stone. This type has been rather unfortu- nately termed shoulder-headed celt; I prefer to adhere to the term spade-shaped celt familiar to us in America where this stone imple- ment widely occurs,1 because it is more appropriate to the matter, for in all likelihood this implement was once really a spade. The Chinese admit that in ancient times coinage was unknown and only barter practised, or as one Chinese author puts it: "In ancient times they carried on trade merely by using what they possessed in exchange for what they did not possess."2 Lumps of metal, metal implements, cloth and silk, also shells seem to have taken the place of money. This primary exchange of actual implements may have led to the practice of casting miniature tools and inscribing them with a fixed valuation. The word tsHen which long ago assumed the mean- ing of money, once occurs in the Shi king (but pronounced tsien) in the sense of a hoe; also the Shuo win attributes this former meaning to the word and defines it as an agricultural implement.3 A coin current during the Chou dynasty under the name "spade-money" (ch'an pi) reveals the form of a spade or shovel 4 and may have been derived from 1 Compare Moorehead, The Stone- Age of North America, Vol. I, p. 335, pp. 418 et seq. 2 L. C. Hopkins in Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1895, p. 329. 3G. Schlegel (Uranographie chinoise, p. 273) takes it in the sense of "sickle." 4 Hopkins, /. c, p. 324. 74 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. an agricultural implement of this type (Fig. n). T. de Lacouperie ' looked upon it as a survival of an implement of the stone age and likened it to "the shouldered celt proper to southeastern Asia, which has hitherto been found only in Pegu, Cambodia (Tonle-Sap), and Central India (Chhota-Nagpur)." This identification, however, is by no means perfect and only partially justified, as there is a remarkable difference in the curves of the edges which are convex in the stone celts and concave in the Chinese spades. Figure n is drawn after an ancient specimen of a bronze spade-shaped coin in our collection which is covered with a fine russet, blue and green pa- tina. The edge is curved in, of almost half- circular shape, Spade-Shaped Bronze Coin (from Specimen in Field Museum). terminating m two lateral tips; the blade is i mm thick. The shoulders are symmetrical, each i cm wide. The handle, the sides of which are in the shape of triangles, is a hollow cast forming a socket betraying the applica- tion of a wooden handle; there is a small triangular opening2 in the upper part of one of the broad faces of the handle to admit of the passage of a cord for closer attachment to the wooden hilt. Related types may be seen also in the jade dance- hatchets of the Han period, as illustrated in Figs. 1-4. These are far advanced products of a higher art, and an attempt to trace them back to their primeval ancestral forms will probably lead to a reconstruction closely related to the type of the spade-shaped celt of stone. Q®v®D n |0 li 111 Q n Fig. 12. Bronze Hatchet of Han Period. 1 Catalogue of Chinese Coins, p. 4 (London, 1892). 2 This is not made in the cast, but cut out after casting. Also the corresponding pieces figured in the Kin-shih so show such apertures of various irregular forms. Feb., 1912. Jade. 75 I here add two other bronze hatchets of the Han period which offer a still more striking analogy to the stone spades. Both are in my col- lection in the American Museum, New York, and were obtained at Si-ngan fu in 1903. The one shown in Fig. 12 (15.3 cm X 6.5 cm) comes nearest of all to the supposed ancestral form and has, of course, assumed under the clever hands of the Chinese bronze-caster a more Fig. 13. Bronze Hatchet of Han Period. regular and graceful appearance. The two shoulders and the head- piece have remained, and the socket is wanting. The headpiece was stuck into the cleft of the wooden hilt, the section decorated with meanders being left uncovered and projecting freely. Cords or leashes passing through the two rectangular apertures in the butt were fastened around the hilt. The blade is covered with three triangles filled, so to speak, with triangular convolute spirals; below these, two crescents surround a circle in slight relief. The significance of the whole orna- mental composition is beyond our knowledge. The bronze axe in Fig. 13 (18 cm X 18 cm) shows the same head-piece without socket, and in the butt three large round perforations (each about 3 cm in diameter), an axe-shaped ornament in relief being between each circle 76 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. and the blade. Shafting was perhaps done differently in this case, the hilt enclosing the head-piece being set vertically on the back of the axe, attachment being strengthened by leashes passing through the three apertures. The spade-shaped implement of stone is a peculiar characteristic of the Colarian tribes of Central India and the Mon-Khmer group in Farther India who speak related languages (South- east-Asiatic or Austronesian stock). Figure 14 shows three of these celts after A. Grunwedel.1 Up to 1873, this type was known only from Pegu and the Malayan Peninsula. In that year, two specimens of the same type were discovered also in Chhota Nagpur in Central India and described by V. Ball,2 — one made of a dark- green hard quartzite, the other of a black igneous rock. Ball was able to show that the material from which they are made occurs in situ within the district of Sing- bhum where the finds had been made, and which be- longs to the habitats of the Colarian group . The identity of these two types with those from Pegu was at once recognized, particularly by I. F. S. Forbes3 who hailed this discovery as a welcome confirmation of the results of comparative philology. These finds have recently much increased, and Noetling obtained two of these spade-shaped celts in Burma, which 1 Prahistorisches aus Birma {Globus, Vol. 58, 1895, p. 15). 2 On some Stone Implements of the Barmese Type, found in Pargana Dalbhum {Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1875, No. VI, pp. 118-120, 1 Plate). 3 Comparative Grammar of the Languages of Further India, p. 142 (London, 1881). Fig. 14. Spade-Shaped Celts (after Grunwedel). 1. From Chhota Nagpur, Central India. 2. From Gangaw, Burma. 3. From Kindat, Burma. The Burmese legend reads mogh-kro (pronounced mo-gyo) , ». e. thunderbolt. Feb., 1912. Jade. 77 are now in the Berlin Museum, and have been compared by Grun- wedel with the Indian types in the article quoted. P. O. Bodding1 brought together more material from the region of the Santal, a branch of the Colarian or Munda group, and combats the view meanwhile set forth by S. E. Peal that these implements have been used as hoes. Peal,2 when in 1893 at Ledo and Tikak, villages of the Naga tribe, east of Makum in Assam, secured two small iron hoes used by women in weeding the hill paddy. They are full-sized instruments, yet the blade measures only two inches square, and the shoulder less than one inch; they have handles of split cane a foot long, the cane being firmly bound round the shoulder. Peal assumes that these hoes are simply the Kol-Mon "shoulder-headed celts" made in iron, and that hence we see not only the meaning of the peculiar "shoulder," but the office of the complete implement as a miniature hoe. Bodding3 objects to this conclusion on the ground that, if these celts should originally have belonged to the ancestors of the Mon-Khmer and Munda peoples, one would expect, if Peal's deductions are correct, to find an iron hoe of the same shape used by these peoples also; but no such implement is found, at least not among the Santal, who, of agricultural tools, know only a stick with a flat piece of iron attached to the end for the purpose of digging roots, or making small holes in the ground. This objection is, in my estimation, not very weighty. We must always be mindful of the overwhelming sway of history and historical events. The Colarian group, who we are bound to suppose migrated in a remote period from Farther India, where it was in close touch with the Mon- Khmer peoples, into their present habitats, have had a long and varied history. Their own traditions carry their migrations back into a period when they were settled in the country on both sides of the Ganges. Starting from the north-east, they gradually worked their way up the valley of the Ganges, until we find them in the neighborhood of Benares with their headquarters near Mirzapur. Here the main body which had occupied the northern bank of the river, crossed and, heading southward, struck the Vindhya hills, until they at length reached the tableland of Chhota Nagpur.4 These events, however, present only 'Ancient Stone Implements in the Santal Parganas (Journal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 70, Part III, No. 1, 1901, pp. 17-22, 4 Plates) and Shoulder-headed and other Forms of Stone Implements in the Santal Parganas (Ibid., Vol. 73, Part III, No. 2, 1904, pp. 27-31). 2 On some Traces of the Kol-Mon-Annam in the Eastern Naga Hills (Ibid., Vol. 75, Part III, No. 1, 1896, pp. 20-24). 3 L. c, p. 29. 4 Compare L. A. WAddell, The Traditional " Migration of the Santal Tribe (Indian Antiquary, Vol. XXII, 1893, pp. 294-296) and A. Campbell, Traditional Migration of the Santal Tribes (Ibid., Vol. XXIII, 1894, pp. 103-104). 78 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. the last landmark in the long migration history of the Colarians. There are reasons to believe that in still earlier times, chronologically not definable, the Colarian-Mon stock when it formed a coherent unbroken ethnic body must have lived along the southern ranges of the eastern Himalaya, extending into the territories of Bengal and Assam. In Tibetan literature and even in the modern Tibetan colloquial lan- guage, the word Mon still appears as a generic designation for all non- Tibetan tribes living southward of the Himalaya and is particularly used in composition with the names of those kinds of cereals and pulse early received by the Tibetans from India.1 Consequently, the Tibetan name Mon originally referred to the Mon tribes, and to those exclusively; while, at a later period, after a disintegration of this group resulting in a migration of the Mon southward into Farther India and of the Colarians into a southwesterly direction, this name was retained by the Tibetans and transferred to new-coming tribes occupying the place of the former emigrants, and then to Northern India in a generalized way. In view of such historical events, to come back to our proposition above, it is quite conceivable that Mon or Colarians, or both as a prehistoric undivided unit, once covered also the territory of the Naga and left there these peculiar stone celts which could have subsequently given the incentive for their imitation in iron. The Colarians preserved them faithfully, until they reached their new home where they gradually dropped into oblivion, as they received iron from their more cultivated neighbors. This consideration is also apt to prove that the spade-shaped stone celt must be of con- siderable antiquity, as also indicated by the extent of the area over which it has been found. It has been a long-lived implement, too, and seems to have still been in actual use during the bronze age. J. Deniker (The Races of Man, p. 364, New York, 1906) figures one polished spade-shaped celt excavated with several others in Cambodja, side by side with objects of bronze.2 All the tribes among which this spade has been found once practised hoe-culture and still partially practise it (see p. 48). Hence it is evident that this implement was the mattock which they used for this 1Laufer in Memoires de la Societe finno-ougrienne, Vol. XI, pp. 94-101 (Hel- singfors, 1898), where all the evidence in this question is brought together. The conclusions as formed above are the same as those at which I arrived thirteen years ago, and after renewed examination, I see no reason to modify them. 2 Curiously enough, he does not refer to the corresponding types of Central India, and is quite unaware of the great importance which this trifling object bears on a chapter in the primeval history in Eastern Asia. His note that the Naga have still at the present day axes of precisely the same form which they use as hoes deserves correction, for the article of Peal to which he refers speaks of hoes made of iron in a similar shape, and which are possibly, but not positively, connected with those ancient stone celts. Feb., 191 2. Jade. 79 purpose, and it thence follows that not the Chinese, full-fledged agri- culturists from the beginning of their history, invented it, but the hoe- culturists adjoining them on the south. This aspect of things will account also for the absence of this stone celt on Chinese soil, as the Chinese had no use for it. They imitated it in a miniature bronze form adapted to the purpose of barter, and if it occurs again in the ceremonial dance-axes of bronze and jade, the reason for this derivation is not far to seek, if we remember that the Chinese, according to their own accounts, derived many of their pantomimic dances from their southern barbarian neighbors, the Man.1 If they derived the dances, there is good reason to believe that they derived simultaneously also the paraphernalia belonging to them. The spade-shaped form of implement in its bronze derivate, accordingly, is one of the numerous objects and ideas which the Chinese took up from the culture-sphere of the South-east at a period when these two great cultural provinces were still separated. The gradual welding of these two into one finally resulted in that culture unit which we now call simply China. 1And most probably, all their ancient dances come from that source. The Chinese have never been a dancing nation, as is easily seen in modern China where no man and no woman is given to dancing; but with the Tibetans, the Man and all Southeast-Asiatic tribes including the Malayan, dancing is popular and national. II. JADE SYMBOLS OF SOVEREIGN POWER Among the numerous offices of the Chou dynasty (b. c. 1122-255) there was a steward of the treasury (t'ien fu) charged with the superin- tendence and preservation of the Hall of the Ancestor (Hou-tsi) of the imperial house, in which all precious objects transmitted from generation to generation were hoarded. He was responsible for the regulations governing the treasury and took care of the emblems of jade and all valuables belonging to the dynastic family. On the occasion of the celebration of a great sacrifice or of a great funeral service, he brought the desired objects out to the place of ceremony, and at the termination of the rites, locked them up again (Biot, Vol. I, p. 480). In the begin- ning of the spring, he sprinkled with the blood of the victims the precious objects and the jewels of the imperial costume. At the end of the winter, he arranged the pieces of jade used in the ceremony which was observed to determine whether a favorable or unfavorable new year would ensue (Ibid., p. 482). In case the emperor transferred his residence and his treasury, he handed all valuables over to the chief of the office in the new place (p. 483). There were, further, at the court of the Chou dynasty, special artisans to execute works in jade (yii jen, "jade men"), in particular the official insignia of jade the care of which was placed in the hands of an officer, called Tien-jui (Biot, Vol. II, p. 519; Vol. I, p. 483). Jui is the general name for the jade tablets conferred by the emperor on the five classes of feudal princes (wu jui) as a mark of investiture and a symbol of their rank, and held by them in their hands, when they had audience in court. The tien-jui official was obliged to distinguish their kinds and names, and to define the ceremonies where they come into action. There were four great audiences, one in each season, and occasional and combined visits of the fief -holders. Different from this office is that of the yii fu (Biot, Vol. I, p. 124). The tien jui was a master of ceremonies in direct connection with the rites in which the treasures in his charge were involved, and taking an active part in the proceedings. The yii fu, however, was an executive official in superintendence of the manufacture of jades and other valuable objects touching on the ceremonial life of the imperial family. The sphere of his competency is not clearly defined from that of the nei-fu who received all precious objects offered to the emperor by the great dignitaries like gold, jade, ivory, furs, weapons, etc., a duty 80 Feb., 191 2. Jade. 81 ascribed also to the yii fu. It seems that the former had the mere function of a collector, the latter that of a preparator who supplied jewelry and ornaments for actual use down to such banalities as an imperial sanitary vessel. In. the official hierarchy of the Chou, everything was defined and regulated according to a well devised scheme which found its expression in a series of jade insignia of power and rank. This is, for several reasons, one of the most difficult subjects of Chinese archaeology. In the Chou li the names and utilizations of these insignia have been handed down without a full description of them which was only supplied by the commentators of the Han period. Most of these insignia were then lost, and the commentators seem to speak of them merely on the ground of traditions. The drawings of these insignia added to the later editions of the Rituals like the San li Vu of Nieh Tsung-i of the Sung period1 are not made from real specimens of the Chou dynasty, but are imaginary reconstructions based on the statements of the commentators to the Chou li, and are therefore worthless, in my opinion, for archaeological purposes. The same judgment holds good for the numerous illustrations of these insignia embodied in the Ku yii t'u p'u which, aside from the spurious inscriptions carved in them, are suspicious because of their striking similarity to the reconstructive drawings of Nieh Tsung-i 2 and because of an abundance of decorative designs which plainly betray the pictorial style of the Sung period and cannot have existed at the time of the Chou dynasty. The ingenious investigations of Wu Ta-ch'eng release me from the task of pursuing this criticism, and I propose to supersede all the doubtful material of imaginative Chinese draughtsmen by his positive results in the shape of a series of genuine jade tokens of the Chou period. I first give a brief review of what the Chou li and its commentators have to say in regard to these insignia, and then proceed to lay before the reader the material of Wu Ta-ch'eng which bears all external and internal evidence of representing the objects spoken of in the Ritual. The emperor was, according to the Chou li, entitled to several jade tablets. Prominent among these are two, "the large tablet" (ta kuei, Biot, Vol. II, p. 522) with hammer-shaped head, three feet long, which he fixed in his girdle; and "the tablet of power" (chen kuei, I. c. p. 519) being one foot two inches long and held by the sovereign in 'I availed myself of the Japanese edition printed in Tokyo, 1761, with a preface by Lan Ca'feNG-Tfc, dated 1676. The date of the original is 962 a. d. * It is also noteworthy that the Sung Catalogue of Jades quotes his work through- out, but not the Chou li or Li ki. I am under the impression that the compilers of t the catalogue made it their object to reconstruct the material described or figured in the San li t'u. 82 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. his hands. It was adorned with bands embroidered in five colors, and the emperor having the ta kuei in his girdle and the chen kuei in his hands offered, during the spring, the sacrifice to the Sun in the morning (Biot, Vol. I, p. 484). * According to the opinion of the commentators of the Han period, designs of hills were engraved on the symbol of sovereign power {chen kuei). This view doubtless arose from the fact that the word chen in the designation of this tablet means not only pacification, submission, power, but is also the name given to the four protecting mountains of the frontier; hence the subsequent illustrators represented this tablet with a conventional design of four hills simply based on this misunderstanding. There can be no doubt that the mean- ing of chen kuei is plainly tablet of power or emblem of sovereignty, and that it has no reference to the four mountains in whose worship it serves no function.2 We shall see from the actual specimen of Wu that the chen kuei was unadorned indeed, and this is quite in harmony with the spirit of the Chou time, all the jade objects of which are of extreme simplicity. It is entirely out of the question that mountain scenery, as the epigones will make us believe, was carved on these jade implements which are connected with most primitive and primeval ideas. These mountain drawings are downright inventions of the Sung period, and suspicion must increase, as different conceptions of them exist. One may be viewed, e. g., in the book of Gingell, p. 33, where the tablet ends above in a pointed angle, and where the four hills are arranged in one vertical row, one placed above the other; also the silken band is here added. This illustration is identical with that in the KHen-lung edition of the Rituals. Another cut is inserted in the Dictionary of Couvreur, p. 433, in which the tablet is surmounted by a rounded knob, and where two hills are placed side by side in the upper part and two others in the same way at the foot. The fact that these imperial emblems were not ornamented is plainly borne out by the wording of the Li ki, for "acts of the greatest reverence admit of no ornament" (Legge, Vol. I, p. 400; Couvreur, Vol. I, p. 549), and for this reason, the ta kuei of the sovereign was not carved with any ornaments; as added in another passage (Couvreur, p. 600), because it was only the simplicity of the material which was appre- ciated.3 1 Compare De Groot, The Religious System of China, Vol. VI, p. 1172. 2 This is expressly stated also by the K'ien-lung editors of the Chou li : by means of the chen kuei, the sovereign rules (chin) and pacifies the empire. 3 This entire disquisition of the Li ki is highly instructive and of primary impor- tance. In some ceremonial usages the multitude of things formed the mark of dis- tinction, in others the paucity of things formed the mark of distinction; in others Feb., 1912. Jade. 83 During the Han dynasty the custom obtained that the jade emblem kuei, of a length of one foot four inches, was interred with the sovereign; it was presented with a piece of red cloth three inches square and hemmed on all sides with scarlet silk of red lining (De Groox, The Religious System of China, Vol. II, p. 404). There was a round jade tablet {yuan kuei, Giles No. 13724) nine inches long, fastened with a silk band, used, as the Chou li says, "to regulate virtue" (Biox, Vol. II, p. 523), or in another passage, "to call forth virtue and to perfect good sentiments" (Vol. I, p. 491). The commentary explains that this tablet is entrusted to the delegates of the emperor; when a feudal prince shows himself virtuous, this tablet is conferred upon him by imperial order as a reward. The tablet is round, another commentary remarks, having no points, which seems to mean an "all-round" perfection. In opposition to the round tablet of perfect virtue, there was the "pointed tablet" {yen kuei, Giles No. 13073) serving "to change conduct, to destroy depravity" (Biox, Vol. I, p. 491). The projecting point, remarks the commentary, is the emblem of wrongs and offences, of the attack on and appeal to duty, of blame and punishment; when the emperor orders a dignitary to abandon his bad behavior and to reform, he sends this tablet to reprimand and to warn him. According to another commentary, it is also a tablet of credence for the delegates of the emperor and of the princes; when a prince despatches a prefect to obtain instructions from the emperor, he enjoins on him to take this tablet, and thus to indicate his mission. Couvreur (p. 433) has figured this tablet with a spiral-shaped cloud-ornament in the upper triangular part and two others placed side by side at the foot. In the K'ien-lung edition of the Rituals, a continuous cloud-ornament covers the body of the kuei, while the triangular point is blank. That the ideas of the Chinese regarding this instrument are much confused, is evident from the confounded descriptions given by the two com- mentators translated by Biox (Vol. II, p. 524). A jade tablet called ku kuei, "tablet with grains," seven inches long, is offered by the emperor to the woman whom he marries (Biox, Vol. II, p. 525), i. e. it accompanied the bridal presents, and designs of grains were engraved on it. This was not, however, a realistic plant- greatness of size formed the mark, in others smallness of size formed the mark; in others, the height formed the mark of distinction, in others lowness formed the mark; in others ornament formed the mark, in others plainness formed the mark. This lesson should be taken to heart by our school of evolutionists who construct the development of all human thoughts by means of artificial and illogical evolutionary and classificatory schemes and know everything with dogmatic peremptoriness about thought evolutions, as if they had rendered themselves actual midwifery services at the birth of every thought. 84 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. design, but "grains" (ku) was merely the name of a geometric orna- ment consisting of rows of small raised dots or knobs which from a supposed resemblance to grains received this name. It occurs also on sacrificial bronze bowls of the Chou period, one of which is in our collection. The tablets called chang (Giles No. 400) will be discussed below in connection with the actual specimens (p. 100). When the sovereign received the feudal lords in audience, he availed himself of a jade tablet called "cap" (mao kuei, Biot, Vol. II, p. 520). It is described by the commentaries as a sort of cube of jade, each side being four inches in length, an arch-shaped section being cut out on the lower face, in order to indicate "that the emperor's virtue can cover and protect the empire." The feudal lords were supposed to hold their jade insignia of rank in their hands, while the sovereign placed the mao over them ("capped" them) to ascertain whether they were genuine. It is mentioned as early as in the Shu king (Ku ming 23, ed. Couvreur, p. 356). The feudal prince of the first rank (kung)1 is invested with the jade tablet called huan kuei "pillar tablet" of a prescribed length of nine inches. The traditional representations figure it either as a pointed kuei with two vertical lines inside running parallel with the lateral sides, or with a top consisting of a horizontal line with two adjoining slanting lines, as may be seen in Fig. 15.2 The commentary adds that the feudal lords of the first rank are the great councillors of the emperor and the descendants of the two first sovereigns; the two "pillars" are emblematic of the palace and support it, as the princes support the emperor. The feudal prince of the second rank (hou) is distinguished by the jade tablet sin kuei, seven inches long. Figure 16 shows the traditional representation of it, with flat top, while again in the illustrations to the Chou li a pointed roof -shaped top appears. But it is noteworthy that in both cases the tablet is unornamented, so that also the K'ien-lung editors had lost confidence in the artificial picture given in the San li Vu and identical with that of Couvreur to be mentioned presently. The word sin "faith" should be read here shen "body," explain the xThe five degrees of feudal rank (wu kio) alleged to have been instituted by the mythical emperors Yao and Shun are called kung, hou, po, tse, nan, commonly ren- dered into English as duke, marquis, earl, viscount, baron (W. F. Mayers, Chinese Reader's Manual, p. 320) ; but as our own political institutions fundamentally differ from those of the Chinese, such translations are misleading, and I therefore prefer to adhere to the plain terminology introduced by Biot: prince or feudal prince of first, second, etc. rank. 2 Derived from the Palace edition of the Li ki (1748); in the illustrations of the same edition to the Chou li, the same tablet is represented with a pointed top. Feb., 1912. Jade. 85 /****% \ ^. it 1 — 5t X 3t is Fig. 15. Fig. 16. Fig. 17. Reconstructions of the Jade Tablets huan knei (Fig. 15), sin kuei (Fig. 16), and kung kuei (Fig. 17) (from the Palace Edition of the Li ki). 86 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. commentaries, so that Biot translates tablette au corps inclint and Couvreur tablette du corps droit. But what does that mean? Couv- reur gives a reproduction of this tablet on which is engraved the figure of a man with long sleeves standing and holding a tablet in his hands. If the proposed reading shen should refer to this figure, it is just a subsequent and secondary reflection as this figure itself, which certainly cannot be a production of the Chou period, but is also a comment and the outcome of a misled imagination of the epigones. & *t Fig. i 8. Fig. 19. Jade Disk with •'Grain" Pattern. Jade Disk with "Rush" Pattern. According to the Notions of the Sung Period (from the Palace Edition of the Li ki). I think the wording of the text simply says what the written symbol implies, — sin kuei, a tablet of credence, a badge of trust and confi- dence. The feudal prince of the third rank (po) is honored with a jade tablet seven inches long, called kung kuei "curved tablet."1 The word kung seems to imply also the idea of submission or subordinance. Figure 17 shows the conception of this tablet in the K'ien-lung period which seems to come nearer to reality than the figure of the San li Vu or Leu king Vu reproduced by Couvreur. While the tablets of the three first feudal ranks belong to the class of kuei, i. e. oblong, flat, angular jade plaques, those assigned to the fourth and fifth ranks are jade disks or perforated circular plaques translated by Biot (Vol. I, p. 485): kuei du corps penchi or tablette au corps droit (Vol. II, p. 520) with reference to the engraved figure of a man holding a tablet (in Couvreur, p. 433) which is, of course, a late invention of the Sung period con- ceived of in justification of this commentatorial explanation. Feb., 1912. Jade. 87 (pi), the one intended for the lord of the fourth rank (tse) decorated with a pattern of grain ku (Fig. 18), and the other for the lord of the fifth rank (nan) ornamented with the emblem of rushes />'« (Fig. Fig. 20. Jade Hammer-Shaped Symbol of Imperial Power, chin kuei. 19).1 The Chinese illustrators of the Sung time represented the former with a naturalistic design of four bundles of grain and the latter with four naturalistic rushes. We explained the grain pattern above; the "rush" pattern was in reality a geometric design consisting of rows of hexagons, as we shall see later on (Fig. 72). We do not treat in this 1 Also figured in Gingell, p. 34, and Couvreur, p. 620. 88 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. chapter of these two emblems, but in the section on the jade symbols of Heaven, as they belong typologically to the series of pi. The main differences of the tablets of rank consisted not only in their length and in their shape, but also in the quality of the material. The Son of Heaven alone was entitled to the privilege of using pure white jade of uniform color, while the princes from the first to the third rank were restricted to the use of jades of mixed colors (Biot, Vol. II, p. 521).1 Jade tablets were also to be sent along with presents of which six kinds were distinguished {leu pi): these were horses accompanied by the tablet kuei; furs presented with the tablet chang; plain silks with the jade ring pi; variegated silks with the jade tube ts'ung; embroidered silks with the jade carving in shape of a tiger {hu) ; and silks embroid- ered in black and white with the huang, a semicircular jade piece.2 We have seen that the chen kuei or tablet of power was the symbol of imperial sovereignty. Wu Ta-ch'eng has discovered a specimen which he believes he is justified in identifying with this object, and which appears as the first illustration in his book, reduced to i7