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The
art of bronze casting during the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties
was based on the fundamentals of pottery making practised during
the Neolithic period. There are three distinctive styles of practical
use: wine vessels such as jue, gu and jia, food vessels such as
ding, fang ding, li and gui, and water vessels such as pan. The
Shang and Western Zhou developed along similar lines but each
has its own characteristics. The most obvious of these characteristics
is that Shang had a very rich variety of wine vessels while Western
Zhou paid more attention to the development of food vessels. Taking
a lesson from the fall of the Shang, the Zhou people by contrast
did not adopt the habits of drinking wine freely. The government
ordered people not to drink at gatherings on pain of punishment
by death. This was the political background for the great decrease
in the number of bronze wine vessels in the early Zhou, and the
eventual complete disappearance of many such vessels. As a result,
very few bronze drinking vessels of the late Western Zhou have
been found.
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