Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell].

  • Stephen Wootton Bushell
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Chinese art / [Stephen Wooton Bushell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    were found, and relate how the roads had been levelled and the river courses cleared for a grand battue carried out by troops of warriors marshalled under the command of the feudal princes. The cyclical number of the day is given in one line, but there is nothing to indicate the year, and Chinese authorities unfortunately differ as to the probable date. It must, at any rate, be before b.c. 770, when we have seen that the capital of the Chou was moved east- wards to Loyang, and their ancestral territory ceded to the rising State of Ch’in, which was destined eventually to supplant them. The older authorities generally referred the inscriptions, on literary grounds chiefly, to the reign of Hsiian Wang (b.c. 827-782), but several competent scholars of more recent date attribute them to Ch’eng Wang (b.c. 1115-1079), on grounds which seem to me to be Well founded. Both the Bamboo Books and the Annals of Lu mention a grand hunting expedition to the south of Mount Ch’i in the spring of the sixth year of Ch’eng Wang, on his return from a military expedition to the Huai river in the east, and the drums are reasonably supposed to have been inscribed on this occasion. The archaic character of the script and its analogies with inscriptions of the time on bronze vessels newly unearthed, tend to strengthen the argument, although it is not universally accepted. Waiving the question of their exact date, the stone drums may be accepted as certainly early relics of the Chou dynasty. A fac-simile of the first of the ten inscriptions taken from one of the old rubbings of the Sung dynasty, subsequently cut in stone in the College of Hang-chou, by the great viceroy and scholar Yuan Yuan (1764-1849), is given in Fig. 7. It runs somewhat as follows :— “ Our chariots were solid and strong, Our teams of well-matched steeds ; Our chariots were shining and bright. Our horses all lusty and sleek. The nobles gathered round for the hunt, And hunted as they closed in the ring, The hinds and stags bounded on, With the nobles in close pursuit.
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