Arc-shaped pendant (huang 璜)

1. Bought from Lai Yuan and Company, New York. For price, see Original Miscellaneous List, p. 197. $125.

2. (Undated Folder Sheet note) Original attribution: Chinese. Han 漢. See further, S.I. 893, Appendix VII.

3. (Carl Whiting Bishop, 1922) For discussion of type, see Berthold Laufer, Jade: A Study in Chinese Archaeology and Religion (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1912), p. 169 et seq., figs. 76--80.

4. (Isabel Ingram Mayer, 1945) Chou [Zhou] 周 dynasty.

5. (William B. Trousdale, 1964) Late Chou [Zhou] 周 dynasty (?). Such pieces are sometimes fashioned from fragments of perforated disks, but this piece was not, to judge by the sudden increase in breadth just before each end.

6. (Thomas Lawton, 1978) Attribution changed from "Chou [Zhou] 周 dynasty (?)" to "Eastern Chou [Zhou] 周."

Some Neolithic pi [bi] 璧 are composed of sections such as F1916.156 and presumably tied by means of the perforations at the edges. See J. G. Andersson, "Researches into the Prehistory of the Chinese," Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 15 (1943), pl. 72, no. 5. The precise dating of F1916.156 is open to further study.

7. (Julia K. Murray, 1982) Changed attribution from Eastern Chou [Zhou] 周 to Neolithic period, third millennium BCE (?). While some of the arc shaped ornaments called huang 璜 seem intended to be tied together to create the complete shape of a pi [bi] 璧 disk, others have been found singly, sometimes placed on the chest of the occupant of a Neolithic grave (see Nanking po-wu-yuan [Nanjing bowuyuan] 南京博物院, "Kiangsu Wu hsien Ts'ao-hsieh-shan i-chih [Jiangsu Wu xian Caoxieshan yizhi] 江蘇吳縣草鞋山遺址," Wen wu tzu liao ts'ung k'an [Wenwu ziliao congkan] 文物資料叢刊 3 [1980], pl. 3:2 for such an example from Wu hsien [Wu xian] 吳縣 Ts'ao hsieh shan [Caoxieshan] 草鞋山). There may also be some significance in the difference between huang 璜 whose outer perimeters form 180-degree arcs (i.e., semi circular huang 璜), and those that form arcs of only 120 degrees (i.e., one third of a circle). Both F1916.156 and F1916.379 belong to the former category, although in the case of F1916.156 the inner perimeter of the arc is greater than 180 degrees. The related huang 璜 F1917.383 seems a more archaic type in which the outer perimeter is a flattened semi circle with a different curvature than the inner perimeter.

Huang 璜 F1916.156 is very similar to one of the examples excavated from Ts'ao hsieh shan [Caoxieshan] 草鞋山 that is reproduced in the illustration cited above. This huang 璜 (M3:7), which like F1916.156 has an inner arc larger than 180 degrees, was found in layer 6. The remains in this layer have been identified as belonging to the Sung tse [Songze] 崧澤 culture, which has produced carbon 14 dates in the fourth and fifth millennia BCE. While F1916.156 may not be quite this early, it seems more likely to belong to the Neolithic period than to the Eastern Chou [Zhou] 周. A comparable huang 璜 in the Fogg Art Museum (acc. no. 1943.50.607) has been published as late Neolithic or Shang 商 (see Max Loehr, Ancient Chinese Jades from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University [Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1975], cat. 96).

8. (Jeffrey Smith per Keith Wilson, July 29, 2008) Ceremonial object added as secondary classification.

9. (Najiba Choudhury per Keith Wilson, September 1, 2016) Period One changed from "Neolithic period" to "Late Neolithic period"; date changed from "ca. 3000 BCE?" to "ca. 3000--1700 BCE"; added description; in the Text Entries field added Chinese translation.