by Will Durant
Bronze is almost as old as jade in the art of China, and even more exalted in Chinese reverence. Legend tells how the ancient Emperor Yü, hero of the Chinese flood, cast the metals sent him as tribute by the nine provinces of his empire into the form of three nine-legged cauldrons, possessed of the magic power to ward off noxious influences, cause their contents to boil without fire, and generate spontaneously every delicacy. They became a sacred symbol of the imperial authority, were handed down carefully from dynasty to dynasty, but disappeared mysteriously on the fall of the Chou—a circumstance extremely injurious to the prestige of Shih Huang-ti. The casting and decoration of bronze became one of the fine arts of China, and produced collections that required forty-two volumes to catalogue them.37 It made vessels for the religious ceremonies of the government and the home, and transformed a thousand varieties of utensils into works of art. Chinese bronzes are equaled only by the work of the Italian Renaissance, and there, perhaps, only by those “Gates of Paradise” which Ghiberti designed for the Baptistery of Florence.
The oldest existing pieces of Chinese bronze are sacrificial vessels recently discovered in Honan; Chinese scholars assign them to the Shang Dynasty, but European connoisseurs give them a later, though uncertain, date. The earliest dated remains are from the period of the Chou; an excellent example of these is the set of ceremonial vessels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Most of the Chou bronzes were confiscated by Shih Huang-ti, lest the people melt them down and recast them as weapons. With the accumulated metal his artisans made twelve gigantic statues, each fifty feet high;38 but not one foot of the fifty remains. Under the Han many fine vessels were made, often inlaid with gold. Artists trained in China cast several masterpieces for the Temple of Horiuji at Nara in Japan, the loveliest being three Amida-Buddhas seated in lotus-beds;39 there is hardly anything finer than these figures in the history of bronze.* Under the Sung the art reached its height, if not of excellence, certainly of fertility; cauldrons, wine vessels, beakers, censers, weapons, mirrors, bells, drums, vases, plaques and figurines filled the shelves of connoisseurs and found some place in nearly every home. An attractive sample of Sung work is an incense burner in the form of a water buffalo mounted by Lao-tze, who bestrides it calmly in proof 01 the power of philosophy to tame the savage breast.40 The casting is throughout of the thinness of paper, and the lapse of time has given the piece a patina or coating of mottled green that lends it the meretricious beauty of decay.† Under the Ming a slow deterioration attacked the art; the size of the objects increased, the quality fell. Bronze, which had been a miraculous novelty in the Chalcolithic Age of the Emperor Yü, became a commonplace, and yielded its popularity to porcelain.
Sculpture was not one of the major arts, not even a fine art, to the Chinese.41 By an act of rare modesty the Far East refused to class the human body under the rubric of beauty; its sculptors played a little with drapery, and used the figures of men—seldom of women—to study or represent certain types of consciousness; but they did not glorify the body. For the most part they confined their portraits of humanity to Buddhist saints and Taoist sages, ignoring the-athletes and courtesans who gave such inspiration to the artists of Greece. In the sculpture of China animals were preferred even to philosophers and saints.
The earliest Chinese statues known to us are the twelve bronze colossi erected by Shih Huang-ti; they were melted by a Han ruler to make “small cash.” A few little animals in bronze remain from the Han Dynasty; but nearly all the statuary of that epoch was destroyed by war or the negligence of time. The only important Han remains are the tomb-reliefs found in Shantung; here again the human figures are rare, the scenes being dominated by animals carved in thin relief. More akin to sculpture are the funerary statuettes of clay—mostly of animals, occasionally of servants or wives—which were buried with male corpses as a convenient substitute for suttee. Here and there animals in the round survive from this period, like the marble tiger, all muscle and watchfulness, that guarded the temple of Sniang-fu,42 or the snarling bears in the Gardner collection at Boston, or the winged and goitrous lions of the Nanking tombs.43 These animals, and the proud horses of the tomb-reliefs, show a mixture of Greco-Bactrian, Assyrian and Scythian influences; there is nothing about them distinctively Chinese.44
Meanwhile another influence was entering China, in the form of Buddhist theology and art. It made a home for itself first in Turkestan, and built there a civilization from which Stein and Pelliot have unearthed many tons of ruined statuary; some of it45 seems equal to Hindu Buddhist art at its best. The Chinese took over those Buddhist forms without much alteration, and produced Buddhas as fair as any in Gandhara or India. The earliest of these appear in the Yün Kan cave temples of Shansi (ca. 490 A.D.); among the best are the figures in the Lung Men grottoes of Honan. Outside these grottoes stand several colossi, of which the most unique is a graceful Bodhisattwa, and the most imposing is the “Vairochana” Buddha (ca. 672 A.D.), destroyed at the base but still instructively serene.46 Farther east, in Shantung, many cave temples have been found whose walls are carved with mythology in Hindu fashion, with here and there a powerful Bodhisattiva like that in the cave of Yun Men (ca. 600 A.D.).47 The T’ang Dynasty continued the Buddhist tradition in sculpture, and carried it to perfection in the seated stone Buddha (ca. 639) found in the province of Shensi.48 The later dynasties produced in clay some massive Lohans—disciples of the gentle Buddha who have the stern faces of financiers;* and some very beautiful figures of the Mahayana deity Kuan-yin, almost in the process of turning from a god into a goddess.49
After the T’ang Dynasty sculpture lost its religious inspiration, and took on a secular, occasionally a sensuous, character; moralists complained, as in Renaissance Italy, that the artists were making saints as graceful and supple as women; and Buddhist priests laid down severe iconographic rules for-bidding the individualization of character or the accentuation of the body. Probably the strong moral bent of the Chinese impeded the development of sculpture; when the religious motif lost its impelling force, and the attractiveness of physical beauty was not allowed to take its place, sculpture in China decayed; religion destroyed what it could no longer inspire. Towards the end of the T’ang the fount of sculptural creation began to run dry. The Sung produced only a few extant pieces of distinction; the Mongols gave their energies to war; the Mings excelled for a passing moment in bizarreries and such colossi as the stone monsters that stand before the tombs of the Mings. Sculpture, choked by religious restrictions, gave up the ghost, and left the field of Chinese art to porcelain and painting.
III. PAGODAS AND PALACES
Chinese architecture—The Porcelain Tower of Nanking—The Jade Pagoda of Peking—The Temple of Confucius—The Temple and Altar of Heaven—The palaces of Kublai Khan—A Chinese home—The interior—Color and form
Architecture, too, has been a minor art in China. Such master-builders as have labored there have hardly left a name behind them, and seem to have been less admired than the great potters. Large structures have been rare in China, even in honoring the gods; old buildings are seldom found, and only a few pagodas date back beyond the sixteenth century. Sung architects issued, in 1103 A.D., eight handsomely illustrated volumes on The Method of Architecture; but the masterpieces that they pictured were all of wood, and not a fragment of them survives. Drawings in the National Library at Paris, purporting to represent the dwellings and temples of Confucius’ time, show that through its long history of over twenty-three centuries Chinese architecture has been content with the same designs, and the same modest proportions.50 Perhaps the very sensitivity of the Chinese in matters of art and taste made them forego structures that might have seemed immodest and grandiose; and perhaps their superiority in intellect has somewhat hindered the scope of their imagination. Above all, Chinese architecture suffered from the absence of three institutions present in almost every other great nation of antiquity: an hereditary aristocracy, a powerful priesthood,51 and a strong and wealthy cent
ral government. These are the forces that in the past have paid for the larger works of art—for the temples and palaces, the masses and operas, the great frescoes and sculptured tombs. And China was fortunate and unique: she had none of these institutions.
For a time the Buddhist faith captured the Chinese soul, and sufficient of China’s income to build the great temples whose ruins have been so lately discovered in Turkestan.52 Buddhist temples of a certain middling majesty survive throughout China, but they suffer severely when compared with the religious architecture of India. Pleasant natural approaches lead to them, usually up winding inclines marked by ornate gateways called p’ai-lus, and apparently derived from the “rails” of the Hindu topes; sometimes the entrance is spiritually barred by hideous images designed, in one sense or another, to frighten foreign devils away. One of the best of the Chinese Buddhist shrines is the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, near the Summer Palace outside Peking; Fergusson called it “the finest architectural achievement in China.”53
More characteristic of the Far East are the pagodas that dominate the landscape of almost every Chinese town.* Like the Buddhism that inspired them, these graceful edifices took over some of the superstitions of popular Taoism, and became centers not only of religious ceremony, but of geomantic divination—i.e., the discovery of the future by the study of lines and clefts in the earth. Communities erected pagodas in the belief that such structures could ward off wind and flood, propitiate evil spirits, and attract prosperity. Usually they took the form of octagonal brick towers rising on a stone foundation to five, seven, nine or thirteen stories, because even numbers were unlucky.56 The oldest standing pagoda is at Sung Yüeh Ssu, built in 523 A.D. on the sacred mountain of Sung Shan in Honan; one of the loveliest is the Pagoda of the Summer Palace; the most spectacular are the Jade Pagoda at Peking and the “Flask Pagoda” at Wu-tai-shan; the most famous was the Porcelain Tower of Nanking, built in 1412-31, distinguished by a facing of porcelain over its bricks, and destroyed by the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion in 1854.
The fairest temples of China are those dedicated to the official faith at Peking. The Temple of Confucius is guarded by a magnificent p’ai-lu, most delicately carved, but the temple itself is a monument to philosophy rather than to art. Built in the thirteenth century, it has been remodeled and restored many times since. On a wooden stand in an open niche is the “Tablet of the Soul of the Most Holy Ancestral Teacher Confucius;” and over the main altar is the dedication to “The Master and Model of Ten Thousand Generations.” Near the South Tatar Wall of Peking stand the Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Heaven. The altar is an impressive series of marble stairs and terraces, whose number and arrangement had a magical significance; the temple is a modified pagoda of three stories, raised upon a marble platform, and built of unprepossessing brick and tile. Here, at three o’clock in the morning of the Chinese New Year, the Emperor prayed for the success of his dynasty and the prosperity of his people, and offered sacrifice to a neuter but, it was hoped, not neutral, Heaven. However, the temple was badly damaged by lightning in 1889.57
More attractive than these stolid shrines are the frail and ornate palaces that once housed princes and mandarins at Peking. A burst of architectural genius during the reign of Ch’eng Tsu (1403-25) reared the Great Hall at the tombs of the Ming Emperors, and raised a medley of royal residences in an enclosure destined to become known as the “Forbidden City,” on the very site where Kublai Khan’s palaces had amazed Marco Polo two centuries before. Ogrish lions stand watch at either side of the marble balustrades that lead to the marble terrace; hereon are official buildings with throne rooms, reception rooms, banquet rooms, and the other needs of royalty; and scattered about are the elaborate homes in which once lived the Imperial Family, their children and relatives, their servants and retainers, their eunuchs and concubines. The palaces hardly vary one from another; all have the same slender columns, the same pretty lattices, the same carved or lettered cornices, the same profusion of brilliant colors, the same upward-curving eaves of the same massively tiled roofs. And like these forbidden delicacies is the second Summer Palace, some miles away; perhaps more completely perfect of its kind, more gracefully proportioned and fastidiously carved, than the once royal homes of Peking.
If we try to express in brief compass the general characteristics of Chinese architecture, we find as a first feature the unpleasant wall that hides the main structures from the street. In the poorer sections these outer walls are continuous from home to home, and betray an ancient insecurity of life. Within the wall is a court, upon which open the doors and lattices of one or several homes. The houses of the poor are gloomy tenements, with narrow entrances and corridors, low ceilings, and floors of the good earth; in many families pigs, dogs, hens, men and women live in one room. The poorest of all live in rain-swept, wind-beaten huts of mud and straw. Those with slightly better incomes cover the floor with mats, or pave it with tiles. The well-to-do adorn the inner court with shrubs and flowers and pools, or surround their mansions with gardens in which nature’s wild variety and playful sports find assiduous representation. Here are no primrose paths, no avenues of tulip-beds, no squares or circles or octagons of grass or flowers; instead, precarious footways wind casually through rock-laid gulleys over devious rivulets, and among trees whose trunks or limbs have been taught to take strange shapes to satisfy sophisticated souls. Here and there dainty pavilions, half hidden by the foliage, offer the wanderer rest.
The home itself is not an imposing affair, even when it is a palace. It is never more than one story in height; and if many rooms are needed, the tendency is to raise new edifices rather than to enlarge the old. Hence a palatial dwelling is seldom one united structure; it is a group of buildings of which the more important follow in a line from the entrance to the enclosure, while the secondary buildings are placed at either side. The favorite materials are wood and brick; stone rarely rises above the foundation terrace; brick is usually confined to the outer walls, earthen tiles provide the roof, and wood builds the decorative columns and the inner walls. Above the brightly colored walls an ornamental cornice runs. Neither the walls nor the columns support the roof; this, heavy though it is, rests only upon the posts that form part of the wooden frame. The roof is the major part of a Chinese temple or home. Built of glazed tiles—yellow if covering imperial heads, otherwise green, purple, red or blue—the roof makes a pretty picture in a natural surrounding, and even in the chaos of city streets. Perhaps the projecting bamboos of ancient tent-tops gave the Far Eastern roof its graceful upward curve at the eaves; but more probably this celebrated form arose merely from the desire of the Chinese builder to protect his structure from rain.58 For there were few windows in China; Korean paper or pretty lattices took their place, and lattices would not keep out the rain.
The main doorway is not at the gable end, but on the southern façade; within the ornamented portal is usually a screen or wall, barring the visitor from an immediate view of the interior, and offering some discouragement to evil spirits, who must travel in a straight line. The hall and rooms are dim, for most of the daylight is kept out by the latticed openings and the projecting eaves. There are seldom any arrangements for ventilation, and the only heat supplied is from portable braziers, or brick beds built over a smoky fire; there are no chimneys and no flues.59 Rich and poor suffer from cold, and go to bed fully clothed.60 “Are you cold?” the traveler asks the Chinese; and the answer is often “Of course.”61 The ceiling may be hung with gaudy paper lanterns; the walls may be adorned with calligraphic scrolls, or ink sketches, or silk hangings skilfully embroidered and painted with rural scenes. The furniture is usually of heavy wood, stained to an ebony black, and luxuriantly carved; the lighter pieces may be of brilliant lacquer. The Chinese are the only Oriental nation that sits on chairs; and even they prefer to recline or squat. On a special table or shelf are the vessels used to offer sacrifice to the ancestral dead. In the rear are the apartments of the women. Separate rooms or detached
buildings may house a library or a school.
The general impression left by Chinese architecture upon the foreign and untechnical observer is one of charming frailty. Color dominates form, and beauty here has to do without the aid of sublimity. The Chinese temple or palace seeks not to dominate nature, but to cooperate with it in that perfect harmony of the whole which depends upon the modesty of the parts. Those qualities that give a structure strength, security and permanence are absent here, as if the builders feared that earthquakes would stultify their pains. These buildings hardly belong to the same art as that which raised its monuments at Karnak and Persepolis, and on the Acropolis; they are not architecture as we of the Occident have known it, but rather the carving of wood, the glazing of pottery and the sculpture of stone; they harmonize better with porcelain and jade than with the ponderous edifices that a mixture of engineering and architecture gave to India, Mesopotamia or Rome. If we do not ask of them the grandeur and the solidity which their makers may never have cared to give them, if we accept them willingly as architectural cameos expressing the most delicate of tastes in the most fragile of structural forms, then they take their place as a natural and appropriate variety of Chinese art, and among the most gracious shapes ever fashioned by men.