CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Shang Dynasty
Chinese art of about 1600–1046 BC: ritual bronzes with taotie masks, oracle-bone inscriptions and carved jade.
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About
The Shang dynasty, which ruled the Yellow River plain from about 1600 to 1046 BC, has left China's earliest surviving writing and its first great age of bronze. Late Shang kings at Anyang practised divination by cracking ox shoulder blades and turtle shells with heat, then incising the questions and outcomes into the bone; these oracle inscriptions are the direct ancestors of Chinese characters.
Bronze was the medium of power. Foundries cast ritual vessels for offerings of food and wine to ancestors in clay piece-moulds, which let decoration be carved crisply into the mould. Look for the taotie, a symmetrical animal mask with bulging eyes that dissolves into scrolls when seen up close. The tomb of Fu Hao, a royal consort and military commander buried around 1200 BC and found intact in 1976, held hundreds of bronzes and jades. Far to the south-west, the separate culture of Sanxingdui cast startling bronze masks and figures in the same era.