466 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
the upper, detachable and divided into compartments, had its bottom 
perforated to admit the steam from below. I saw also a large vase, 
of a slightly oblate spheroidal form, with a rather wide mouth with 
everted rim; the interesting thing about this was that the exterior 
was divided by bands into three registers, each ornamented in a 
totally distinct style—so very distinct, indeed, that if appearing on 
separate vessels they would probably be attributed to different epochs 
or schools. 
Another vessel was in the shape of a squat, short-legged quad- 
ruped with widely distended mouth, perhaps meant for one of the 
great dogs mentioned in the Classics as being imported into China 
from the barbarous tribes to the northwest. The cover, on the back, 
was ingeniously linked to the curled-over tail by means of a chain 
exactly resembling in shape one of the bronze snaffle bits already 
mentioned. The short legs of this curious creature had been knocked 
off by the diggers but had fortunately been preserved, and I was 
able to prop it up in what must have been pretty much its original 
position before photographing it. 
For sheer beauty and grace, among all the objects included in 
this find I saw nothing to compare with two cranes, highly natural- 
istic save for a certain conventional squaring of the wing tips, and 
so charmingly executed that one could almost fancy them in actual 
flight. Unfortunately both had been broken by the diggers into a 
number of pieces, some of which had been lost, or were perhaps 
included in the innumerable baskets of fragments with which the 
room was filled—melancholy monuments to the manner in which the 
excavation of this superlatively wonderful site had been conducted. 
And to judge by the condition of these two cranes, there may quite 
possibly have been other small objects, of no less artistic excellence, 
which have been reduced simply to old metal; for even among the 
larger and more massive pieces the damage done is simply unbeliey- 
able unless seen. In fact I was told that the diggers deliberately 
broke up numbers of objects in the hope that they might turn out 
to be of gold. 
If the two cranes take the palm for grace and charm, for pure 
grotesquerie and, one might almost say, horror, it must be awarded 
to a monster figure, about one foot in height, seated upon its haunches, 
with forelimbs raised to its vast mouth as if gnawing something; 
with a hideous toadlike face and huge bulbous eyes; and with the 
stumps of two spiral upward pointing horns that the diggers had 
knocked off, as they had also done its hind feet. This object seems 
to have puzzled all who have seen it. I know of nothing in the 
slightest way resembling it in the Chinese art of any period. It is 
something wholly new to me, and it is all the more unfortunate that 
