The above picture shows three mysterious jade objects found in ancient tombs that are carbon dated to 5000 years ago, before there was any written history. Ancient books, mostly finished in the Han Dynasty but some already in existence in Zhou times and containing fragmentary legends that would have been orally transmitted before the invention of writing, obscurely mention jade objects used in some heaven and earth worship rituals. It is hard to make sense, first because the descriptions are so obscure, second because we are not sure which actual objects the mentioned names correspond to. After working through various possibilities, it is now commonly agreed that the cong 琮described in the books correspond to the rectangular block with round hole in the middle. The other two have so far not been identified with objects mentioned in the books, and are referred to by the modern names invented from their shape: the Horse Hoof Object and the Cylinder Shaped Object. They have the common feature that all have a hole in the middle, and at least for the cong, there is the idea that it "goes through to heaven", thus allowing us to imagine that the other two also have the same function.

A seemingly unrelated obscure detail in history books was that in Zhou times, the state of Chu had the duty to provide the Zhou court with "holy reeds" for the purpose of "absorbing wine". It is vaguely known that some ancient rituals involve a divine statue made from a bundle of reed; when wine is poured on the statue, it gets absorbed, as if the god has drunk it. Some believe this came from west asia: during the harvest, the last bunch of wheat from the field is bundled up and worshiped as the corn god.

A Japanese author connected the two obcure details together: he suggested that the sacred reeds are plugged into the hole in a cong to symbolize humans getting through to heaven with the help of the divinity represented by the reeds. I myself have suggested that the Horse Hoof Object was the original version, and later evolved into the more formal, artistically crafted cong and Cylinder Shape Object versions. Someone else suggested that the Horse Hoof Object symbolized the vagina, through which humans are born, arriving into the material world from another world that ancient humans imagined to be existing on the other side. Of course this is all just guessing, since we have nothing more concrete to work with.

The more concrete question is how long it took the ancient humans to learn the jade carving skills while at the same time working out the religious ideas. Before such fine objects could be produced with the necessary skills, they first had to produce more crude objects using easier materials and simpler tools. It is impossible to jump from pottery to fine jade; possibly the intermediary steps were wood and bone; while carved wood objects from over 5000 years ago would have rotted away, some bone objects ought to have survived.

上面图中三种玉礼器， 中间都有孔，应该同“通天”有关。有一位日本作者提议孔是用来插包茅的。周朝时楚国有进贡包茅的责任，用以“缩酒”，似乎源自捆茅做神像，倒酒在神像上被 吸收好像神饮酒。（这又好像同西亚习俗有关：收割麦时留下最后一束麦作伸像崇拜）。把神茅插在孔里，象征人通过神通天。

如果这个想法对的话，左边的红山马蹄器应该是原始的，后来正规化演变成良渚琮和筒形器。有人提议马蹄器象征阴道，人由另一世界来，通过阴道进入人间；也就是说，阴道是天地之间的通路。

雕玉需要时间发展工具技术，而宗教思想也要时间形成。古人在还不会雕玉的时代，应该有用过简单工具容易用的材料做过更原始的礼器，不过如果是用木或骨，已经烂掉了我们看不到。陶器能留到今天，不过制陶和雕玉技术相差太大不能由陶进化去玉。

The the taotie 饕餮

Shang bronze utensils are noted for a gross scariness that somehow suited their culture, which is known, from inscriptions on oracle bones, to require almost nonstop divinations about whether the gods approved even the smallest actions the king wished to undertake, including, for example whether it is OK to make sacrifices to the gods with 3 cows, 5 cows or 7 cows. Mangled skeletons from graves show that human sacrifice was carried out regularly, often on a very large scale. (Reminder of Cambodia under Pol Pot.) Otherwise we have no information, first hand or even second hand, about what life was like in Shang times, unlike the Greeks who left us wall paintings, pottery pictures and legendary epics that at least allow partial glimpses into life 3000 years ago.

A prominent feature of the bronze utensils is the taotie monster face, of which a number of examples are shown in the above diagram together with several related objects. Two are >4000 year old jade objects with the Liangzhu monster face, one a detail on a jade knife from the Longshan era several hundred years later than Liangzhu, with a clear derivation relation to the taotie. Also shown are two other Shang objects, one a bronze utensil showing a tiger swallowing a human and the other a jade carving showing an eagle holding two human heads. The latter two have been differently interpreted, that the tiger/eagle is some kind of guardian demon embracing/protecting the humans, or destroying harmful ghosts. This interpretation fits in with the frequently appearing taotie - it ought to be a "good guy" not a "bad guy" if the Shangs wanted to see it so often.

The demon is probably related to the ghost eating Zhongkui that appear in stories and rituals of much later times. Even today jade carvings representing Zhongkui's head, and paintings depicting him giving his sister away as bride (with some mythological meaning which we no longer know), can be found in arts and crafts shops. Some Japanese pictures of Zhongkui show him with four eyes, apparently related to the two-faced Liangzhu monster, and an annual Zhou ritual has a ghost-exorcist mask with four eyes; today some parts of China still have these masked rituals but now presented as festival drama acts; the masked Noh plays of Japan appear to be another residual practice. The door demons used by the traditional Chinese mansions are another residual practice involving this ghost eater.

A Zhou book mentions the taotie as a greedy monster that self destructed from over indulgence. This is most probably a misinterpretation by someone writing in a later era when ritualistic practices of past dynasties were only vaguely known. Today taotie is mainly used in restaurant advertisements of grand banquets.

上 图有几张商青铜器上常见的饕餮面，同良渚神徽显然有关。又有关的是商玉鹰攫人首玉佩和虎食人卣，给我们的感觉是恐怖吓人；这也是商青铜器通常给人的感觉。 但有些作者认为虎/鹰是保护神拥抱人/带人升天，或是在毁灭恶鬼。饕餮出现这么多，好象应该是正面角色，也是一种保护神。但我们对狂热拜神，残酷牺牲的商 文化了解有限，这些都只是猜测而以。周朝有书提到饕餮，是一因贪食伤身的怪物，但这恐怕又是后代不知道乱猜而以。今天有提到饕餮，几乎一定是什么豪华大餐 的广告。钟馗，门神都是这食鬼神演化出来的，周朝的除夕傩礼有个黄金四目的方相似乎就是由双面的良渚神徽衍出的，而中国后来的傩戏和日本的能戏也是源出于 此；日本有些钟馗图中他有四只眼，应该就是由方相出来的。

The Liangzhu Monster Face 良渚神徽

Archaeologists found in China two neolithical centres of jade worship: the Hongshan sites in northern china yielded a relatively small number of objects, but with highly imaginative designs and polished execution (considering the primitive tools available at the time) that challenged our modern, patronizing view about the ancient state of mind; the southern Liangzhu sites are even more impressive: there are great numbers of them spread over much of middle part of eastern china, and they are of a large scale, with each tomb situated on a soil platform that would have required thousands of people to pile up, and many yielding hundreds of jade items per tomb. While the majority of these lacked the artistic refinement of Hongshan jade, the more complex objects pose their own challenges to our understanding of the ancient people.

The picture of a two-faced demon, with numerous variations, appears frequently on Liangzhu jade objects, mostly on the ritual "cong", but occasionally also on axes and discs.I myself have an unusually shaped, flattened cong with two faces instead of the standard four, and a circular tube with three demon faces. The former type, as far as I could discover, has not before been seen either in archaeological sites nor in private collections, while only a small number of the latter type are known. Whereas the four faced congs usually have the demon face on each corner, one large cong has demon faces in the corners as well as in the middle of each side, with a pair of bird signs separating the frontal and corner faces. A similar arrangement is used on each side of my two-faced cong, with two corner demons, two centre demons, and four bird signs separating them. The tube has three different types of demon faces, each of a familiar design from unearthed jade.

The figure as a whole is a man wearing a large feather hat with perched legs and spread-out upper arms, but sharply bent elbows so that the lower arms and hands point back at his own chest, while the lower face appears to consist of eyes that are also the breasts of the man, a nose that might be the man's genitals, and a mouth that might be considered to be the navel though it is situated rather low, or possibly the vagina. The strokes that draw out the eyes, arms and legs, however, seem to bear the skin pattern of a python. In short, the picture contains a variety of ideas of some divine ancestral figures that have been amalgamated.

Given the large scale of the Liangzhu tombs and the complex ritualistic thinking presented by the variety and elaboration of jade objects, the Liangzhu people had a highly organized social system, which somehow left no trace in historical records. We have no idea what happened to the Liangzhu people, other than that around 2000BC they disappeared from their original locations, but some subsequent sites showing Liangzhu influence were found in the surrounding regions such as Shandong, Guangdong and Taiwan. A simpler version of the demon face, usually embedded into a figure with more prominent bird features, appears on jade "blade objects" in Shandong, and this probably developed into the Shang taotie figure that appears on bronze vessels.

We also do not know what the Liangzhu people used the cong for. It has been suggested that the round hole is used to hold sacred reeds/feathers that represent ancestral gods, and ritual wine is poured down the reeds during ceremonies to represent gods accepting the gift by soaking up the wine. Some contemporary sites in northwest china also have jade congs, but plainly polished with no demon faces, and this type of cong also occasionally appears in Shang and Zhou sites. However, the few mentions of the cong in Zhou ritual books are too obscure for us to definitively interpret whether congs were used in this way, in contrast to the quite frequent mentions of the jade disc being used as gift to honour visitors and jade rings being worn as indications of status in Zhou historical records. Zhou books' few mentions of taotie are also nonsensical so it appears that one thousand years after the Liangzhu people's disappearance, the Chinese world had already lost all knowledge of them.