The art of the Chou dynasty, as expressed in bronze and jade, is fairly well known from illustrated Chinese and Western works. It reflects a priestly culture in its hieratic forms and symbolical ornament. It is majestic and stern, severely disdainful of sentiment and sensuous appeal. Of the pottery we know little, but that little shows us a purely utilitarian ware of simple form, unglazed and almost devoid of ornament. On Plate 1 are two types which may perhaps be regarded as favourable examples of Chou pottery. A tripod vessel, almost exactly similar to Fig. 1, was published by Berthold Laufer,[9] who shows by analogy with bronzes of the period good reasons for its Chou attribution, which he states is confirmed by Chinese antiquarians. His example was of hard "gray clay, which on the surface has assumed a black colour," and it had the surface ornamented with a hatched pattern similar to that of our illustration. It has been assumed that this hatched pattern is a sure sign of Chou origin, and I have no doubt that it was a common decoration at the time. But its use continued after the Chou period, and it is found on pottery from a Han tomb in Szechuan, which is now in the British Museum. It is, in fact, practically the same as the "mat marking" on the Japanese and Corean pottery taken from the dolmens which were built over a long period extending from the second century B.C. to the eighth century A.D. The taste of the time is reflected in a sentence which occurs in the _Kuan-tzŭ_, a work of the fifth century B.C.: "Ornamentation detracts from the merit of pottery."[10] The words used for ornamentation are _wên ts´ai_ [Chinese] (lit. pattern, bright colours), and they seem to imply a knowledge of some means of colouring the ware. As there is no evidence of the use of glaze before the Han period, and enamelling in the ordinary ceramic sense is out of the question, we may perhaps assume that some of the pottery of the Chou period was painted with unfired pigments, a method certainly in use in the Han dynasty. There is a vase in the British Museum of unglazed ware with painted designs in black, red and white pigments, which has been regarded as of Han period, but may possibly be earlier (Plate 2, Fig. 3). In addition to the Chou tripod, Laufer[11] illustrates five specimens of pre-Han pottery, excavated by Mr. Frank H. Chalfant "on the soil of the ancient city of Lin-tzŭ in Ch´ing-chou Fu, Shantung," a district which was noted for its pottery as late as the Ming period.[12] This find included two pitchers, a deep, round bowl, a tazza or round dish on a high stem, and a brick stamped with the character _Ch´i_, all unglazed and of grey earthenware. From this last piece, and from the fact that Lin-tzŭ, until it was destroyed in 221 B.C., was the capital of the feudal kingdom of Ch´i, Laufer concluded that these wares belonged to a period before the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). [Illustration: Fig. 1 Fig. 2