Needless to say, China was not uninfluenced by this contact with the West. The merchants brought back Syrian glass, the celebrated envoy Chang Ch´ien in the second century B.C. introduced the culture of the vine from Fergana and the pomegranate from Parthia, and some years later an armed expedition to Fergana returned with horses of the famous Nisæan breed. But from the artistic standpoint the most important event was the official introduction of Buddhism in 67 A.D. at the desire of the Emperor Ming Ti and the arrival of two Indian monks with the sacred books and images of Buddha at Lo-yang. The Buddhist art of India, which had met and mingled with the Greek on the north-west frontiers since Alexander's conquests, now obtained a foothold in China and began to exert an influence which spread like a wave over the empire and rolled on to Japan. But this influence had hardly time to develop before the end of the Han period, and in the meanwhile we must return to the conditions which existed in China at the beginning of the dynasty. The hieratic culture of the Chou, and the traditions of Chou art with its rigid symbolism and formalised designs, had been broken in the long struggles which terminated the dynasty and banned by the iconoclastic aspirations of the tyrant Chêng, and though partially revived by Han enthusiasts, they were essentially modified by the new spirit of the age. Berthold Laufer,[14] in discussing the jade ornaments of the Chou and Han periods, speaks of the "impersonal and ethnical character of the art of that age"--viz. the Chou. "It was," he continues, "general and communistic; it applied to everybody in the community in the same form; it did not spring up from an individual thought, but presented an ethnical element, a national type. Sentiments move on manifold lines, and pendulate between numerous degrees of variations. When sentiment demanded its right and conquered its place in the art of the Han, the natural consequence was that at the same time when the individual keynote was sounded in the art motives, also variations of motives sprang into existence in proportion to the variations of sentiments. This implies the two new great factors which characterise the spirit of the Han time--individualism and variability--in poetry, in art, in culture, and life in general. The personal spirit in taste gradually awakens; it was now possible for everyone to choose a girdle ornament according to his liking. For the first time we hear of names of artists under the Han--six painters under the Western Han, and nine under the Eastern Han; also of workers in bronze and other craftsmen.[15] The typical, traditional objects of antiquity now received a tinge of personality, or even gave way to new forms; these dissolved into numerous variations, to express correspondingly numerous shades of sentiment and to answer the demands of customers of various minds."