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(Frontispiece.) Blue-and-white Kang Hsi porcelain jar with prunus design. Ch'ing period. Morse collection, New York.
who has shared my interest in Chinese art
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The third and last phase of Yang Shao pottery culture is usually called Ma Ch'ang, after the principal site where remains have been found. Probably representing a culture in transition from ceramic to bronze crafts and proper to the period from about 1700 to 1500 B.C., pottery of this order continued to be produced in Kansu well into historical times. Apparently deriving from the Pan-shan type of middle Yang Shao pottery, the vessels are coarser and the forms and designs are less attractive. The symbols are generally the same but have lost something of the earlier expressive power. Later phases of pottery culture followed this last phase of the Yang Shao, but these are uninteresting as art works. The forms of these wares are weak. The painted designs are carelessly executed and no longer related to surface contours. Certainly by this time the superior bronze culture of the Shang dynasty had displaced neolithic ceramic culture in all but the outlying backward regions.
Less ancient than the Yang Shao painted red ware but also artistically important, a second genre of neolithic pottery was contemporary with the last phase of Yang Shao. Called Lung-shan after the site in Shantung where the first examples were found, it was first thought to be of a purely local culture. In recent years, however, discoveries in Honan and other provinces support the belief that this pottery was made throughout northern China from about 1700 B.C. until the rise of Shang culture around 1500 B.C. This pottery is most commonly a grey ware, sometimes a black ware, decorated with comb marks, incised patterns, or impressed designs instead of painted designs. Among a great variety of shapes, some anticipate those of later Chinese art such as the li tripod, the tsun goblet, the tou fruit stand, and the ting. The silhouettes of Lung-shan vessels are sharper and more linear than those of the Yang Shao. Above all, these wares are more technically advanced, having been formed on the fully developed potter's wheel and fired in a process involving oxidation and reduction.
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