Pots and thrones: ritual bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties

Last night at St Martin-in-the-Fields we heard Yi Chen speak on 'Pots and thrones: ritual bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.' This was the fourth in an occasional series of talks on different aspects of Chinese Art organised as joint events with our Chinese Congregations.

Yi Chen is Curator: Early Chinese Collections at the British Museum. Since it first opened in 1992, the China and South Asia gallery (Room 33) at the British Museum (of which the Early Chinese Collections are part) has helped millions of visitors experience its rich history through a plethora of objects, paintings, and sculptures. The gallery underwent a significant redesign and re-opened in November of 2017 with the content within the gallery being condensed and brought up to the present day. In addition to her work at the British Museum, Yi has spoken and written on aspects of Chinese Art from Late Neolithic to Bronze Age southern China through Buddhist Images on the theme of Pure Land to Fang Zhaoling, one of the foremost women artists of 20th-century China.

Tonight she focused on pots and thrones, ritual bronze vessels from the time of the earliest archaeologically recorded dynasty in Chinese history and opened up aspects of the growth and maturity of a civilization that would be sustained in its essential aspects for another 2,000 years. The rituals for which these vessels were used carried such an important social function, that it is possible to read into the forms and decorations of these objects some of the central concerns of the societies that produced them.

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