Reading between the lines

The building of a society

The amount of labor required for such a project challenges the imagination, especially given the rather primitive tools the Liangzhu people had at their disposal. They were, at least in part, motivated by the same thing that had committed the jade-carvers to their endeavors, says Wang, pointing to two tiered altar cemeteries that lie far outside the outer city walls.

Both were built in the very early stage of the Liangzhu civilization, before the Fanshan site and the palatial complex, and have turned out a sizable amount of ritual jade including cong bearing the aforementioned man-and-beast motif.

"A unified belief seems to have formed before the construction of the city and served as a major driving force. Those laid to eternal rest at Fanshan, given the amount of jade they possessed in the afterlife and the site's location, were very likely to be ones who made the decision to build Liangzhu as we know it today. They did so in the name of the divinities, with whom they communicated, aided by ritual jade items," Wang says.

Few have studied the Fanshan jades as carefully as Fang Xiangming who, in 2001, spent more than six months recording each and every one of them through his drawings, which at one point were done with Fang wearing gloves so that his sweaty fingers wouldn't be in direct contact with the pieces. Today the director of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Fang reminisces about that experience in Wang's oral history.

A major challenge was presented by the "king of all cong", whose maker, a master craftsman, managed to carve five fine lines within a width of 1 millimeter. "With the thinnest drawing pen I could find at the time, I couldn't do it, which meant that I couldn't draw it at a 1:1 ratio," the 56-year-old recalls.

The man-and-beast pattern has strained both of his eyes — in very much the same way it does to visitors at the Shanghai Museum — and his mind.