Bronze

A crane takes off from the lid of a bronze vessel, and three centuries of rigid ritual art end.

A rhinoceros stands with its head down and its hide worked in gold and silver cloud scrolls, a real animal turned into a wine vessel by people who had seen one. The Western Han cast this zun as a study from life: the body is heavy, the inlay is fine, and the whole thing reads

A slender tripod cup on blade-thin legs, the oldest bronze vessel shape China has, and the moment drinking became a ritual instead of a reflex. The jue belongs to the Erlitou culture, the early Bronze Age society some identify with the Xia, and it shows casting at its first confident step: a spout, a tail,

A bronze basin the length of a child, made to hold water at the ritual bath and to record a cavalry raid that went very well. Lord Bai of Guo had the victory cast into a 111-character inscription: he cut down five hundred foes and took their horses, and the Zhou king rewarded him for

An unremarkable pot from the outside, and a 499-character letter from a king to his minister on the inside: the longest inscription ever found on a Chinese bronze. King Xuan of Zhou gave Maogong a charge and a vessel to remember it by, spelling out duties, warnings, and gifts in a single breath of archaic

A bronze basin whose inside is covered with a contract: two states, a disputed border, and the witnesses who guaranteed the deal three thousand years before international law had a name. The San Family Plate records a land settlement between the states of San and Ji, inscribed in dense clerical script that scholars still decode

A cooking tripod whose handles are two rams’ heads and whose surface is crowded with small beasts, as if the Bronze Age wanted its utensils to bite back. The Boju li is named for an official, Boju, named in its long inscription, and dated to the early Western Zhou. It is the showpiece of the