Charm from China’s past

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 11

Charm from China’s past

Ancient Chinese Bromes. By William Watson. Faber (Second edition). 128 pp. and 104 plates. $25.80. (Reviewed by John Wilson)

No objects better characterise the magnificence and the strangeness of early China than its variously shaped, elaborately decorated bronze vessels. Nor have any cultural objects aged quite so marvellously as these same vessels, now with an appealing patina. William Watson’s volume on these bronzes has been the standard work since it first appeared in 1962. Like the bronzes it has aged well. There have been enormous advances in Chinese archaeology in that decade and a half. The Chinese of today may have repudiated much of China’s past, but they have remained justifiably proud of China’s cultural achievements and proved diligent and persistent in uncovering more and more of that past through archaeological excavation. Archaeology was one of the few activities, it seems, that was not seriously interrupted by the political turbulence of the 1960 s and early 19705. But Watson has not found it

necessary to do more than add a new preface and new plates. He admits his original work was weak on the regional traditions of the pre-Han period and that were he to rewrite the book entirely, he would have to take some themes very much further. That the text is otherwise still basically sound in a field which has seen such advances is a tribute to Watson’s scholarship. The book is not regarded solely as a work for other scholars. Watson has absorbed a vast number of technical, specialised and learned works, and has recast the material in an abbreviated form that gives the ordinary reader access to those words.

Apart from its scholarship, the plates must commend the book. The vessels, and other objects, are amazing artistic and technological achievements, some ponderous, some graceful, worth contemplating quite apart from what they reveal of the times when they were made. Objects fashioned from the middle of the second millenium B.C. to the end of the second century A.D. can still thrill viewers two thousand and more years later.