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- Introduction
No other country in the world can match China in the number of ancient tombs being discovered and excavated. Since the establishment of the People�s Republic of China in 1949, tens of thousands of ancient tombs from Neolithic times (c. 8000- 2000 B.c.) to the Qing period (1644-1911) have been excavated. China has one of the world�s greatest and longest mortuary art legacies. It is not our purpose to analyze the burial customs of ancient China in this short study, interesting though it might be, but to examine the ceramic tomb figurines placed in the grave.
In the early part of this century, China began building its first railway. In the process, the workers frequently cut through ancient cemeteries, bringing to light many clay funerary figurines. The Chinese did not prize these figures and often discarded or smashed them. Little did they guess that future connoisseurs of Chinese art would pay enormous prices for them. When it was finally realized that the clay figurines were valuable, professional grave robbers began to carry out clandes�tine raids. It should be pointed out that throughout the centuries, the vast majority of ancient tombs had already been stripped of their precious treasures of jade, gold and silver, but the robbers had left the clay figurines untouched, as they felt them worthless.
The looted figurines of the early twentieth century were passed from dealer to collector accompanied by vague information on the date and location of the tomb. Often the figurines, which made up a tomb set, were separated and sold individually. It was in this fragmented way that the early grave figurines came into museum and private collections in Asia, Europe and America. This exhibition is made up of tomb figurines collected in this manner. Since little, if any, archaeological data accom�panied a particular piece, we must rely entirely on stylistic analysis to place the figurine in its proper epoch. This process has been greatly helped in recent times because modern China has placed great emphasis on archaeology, and ancient tombs are now being excavated by well-trained archaeologists, who publish illus�trated reports in archaeological journals.
Collectors of Chinese art came to admire the great beauty and exquisite workmanship of these figurines. Historians also appreciate the statues because they offer unrivalled material for the study of daily life across the length and breadth of ancient China, revealing the different classes of people once found in China; the costumes they wore; the manner in which the ladies dressed their hair; the armour and weapons of their warriors; their musical instruments; their dances and other forms of amusement; the strange merchants who came from foreign lands to trade with them; how they rode their magnificent horses; the vehicles they used; the houses they lived in and their household utensils; the domestic animals they bred and the animals they hunted. The figurines also reveal the ancient Chinese beliefs in the supernatural with its demons and mythical creatures.
In the first part of the twentieth century, Chinese tomb figurines became so popular to collect that imitations soon appeared on the market in great numbers. The copies fall into two groups: those made in good faith as obvious replicas, and those which were made for the deliberate purpose of passing off a fake for an original in order for financial gain. Some of these fakes were so well made that they were indistinguishable from the genuine ones except by experts, and even they were sometimes deceived. The only way to positively tell the difference between a good fake and an original is by a scientific dating process called thermoluminescence (ionizing radiation).
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