CHINESE BRONZES—FERGUSON. 591 
are plain and without adornment, those of the Chow dynasty are 
finely engraved, while those of the Hsia are different from either of 
these. I have often seen vessels of the Hsia dynasty on which gold 
was inlaid thin as hairs. In course of time the gold fell out, leaving 
sunken places, so that the ornamentation became depressions. Such 
inlaying is now often wrongly attributed to the Shang dynasty by 
those whose knowledge is limited. They should remember the 
poetical quotation— 
Engraved and chiseled are the ornaments, 
Of metal and of jade is their substance. 
—Shih King ITI, 1, 4, 5. 
and thus know that these were of the three dynasties period. 
NEW BRONZE VESSELS. 
New bronze vessels refers to those cast during the T’ang, Sung, 
and Yuan dynasties. From the time of the Emperor Yuan Pao 
(742-756) of the T’ang dynasty, down through the Sung dynasties, 
such vessels were made at Ku-yiing. Many were also made at T’ai 
Chow, but these were chiefly of the small lui-wen pattern. During 
the Yuan dynasty, Chiang Lang-tzu, of Hangchow, and Lu Wang-chi, 
of Ping Chiang, were noted artisans, but the figures on their work 
were without delicacy. However, Chiang was a better workman 
than Lu. 
METHOD OF DETERMINING ANCIENT BRONZE VESSELS ADOPTED BY 
THE HOUSEHOLD DEPARTMENT OF THE CHING DYNASTY. 
Vessels of the Shang dynasty were unadorned, those of the Chow 
dynasty were richly engraved with fine lines, while those of the 
Hsia dynasty were inlaid with gold which had the appearance of fine 
hairs. These fundamental facts can not be overlooked. 
The inscriptions on chung, ting, tsun, and 1 during the Hsia, Shang, 
and early part of the Chow dynasty had only 1 or 2 characters, and 
at the most 20 or 30. Long inscriptions of two or three hundred 
characters belong to the later part of the Chow dynasty or to the 
early Ts’in. There were also genuine vessels of the three dynasties 
which bore no inscription, for the reason that they were the property 
of families which had no special merit to be commemorated. Such 
vessels can not be discarded as spurious. The characters used in 
inscriptions of the Hsia dynasty were niao chi (bird tracks), those of 
Shang were ch’ung-yti (insects and fish), while those of Chow were 
ch’ung-yti and the large ‘“‘seal.”” Ts’in dynasty used the large and 
small “‘seal”’ characters, but from the Han dynasty onward small seal 
characters were used. The three dynasties used sunken inscriptions, 
while the T's’in and Han used inscriptions in relief, and occasionally 
sunken ones, which were incised with tools in the same manner as 
