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 period 1 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. 



