ANTIQUITY on its own is not enough to excite the imagination: the stone you stub your toe on in the sand is millions of years old. What excites us is the hand of man - and the more visible the better. However interesting a shard of pottery may be to an archaeologist, to the ordinary woman in the street, it's hard to distinguish from a broken flowerpot.
No great leaps of imagination, however, are needed to enjoy the Mysteries Of Ancient China exhibition which opened last week at the British Museum. This is the first major exhibition in London of Chinese discoveries since The Genius Of China at the Royal Academy in 1973. And never has the term "bronze age" seemed more appropriate than here: while in the ancient middle East and the Mediterranean the shortage of tin and copper meant bronze was a precious commodity reserved for the business of war and weaponry, in China it was plentiful.
Unlike the Egyptians, who were happy to pack their tombs with models to represent their afterlife needs, the Chinese took with them the real thing - ritual vessels, usually of bronze, used at ceremonial banquets to offer food and wine to ancestors. Not only would these highly prized family treasures, on which they lavished their great wealth, provide wherewithal in the next life but, exhibited to mourners before the funeral, they also served on this side of the grave as symbols of worldly success.
In the West, bronze was hammered to make it go further in China there was no need for such economies. In addition, the Chinese had the technology (not discovered in the West until the Renaissance) to use terracotta moulds for casting that would not disintegrate when the molten bronze was poured in. As a result, the detail on the bronze pieces is as delicate and defined as it was on the day it was made - and we're talking of 3,000 years ago. Only the key to their symbolism is missing.
As befits an exhibition devoted to treasures excavated from tombs, the atmosphere is contemplative. The hurly burly of the museum proper is forgotten as you are led through a labyrinth of dark, cave like rooms, where tightly focused halogen lighting emphasises the uniqueness of each piece. Voices rarely rise above a whisper, and the usual tiled floors of the museum have been carpeted with coir matting. But from the objects themselves one gets no impression of brief or loss. Quite the reverse. To these people death was just a staging post to the afterlife, where the usual range of activities would be on offer. As well as food and drink, sexuality, music and games all had their place. Decoration is exuberant and bursting with life, echoed in the birds and monkeys, turtles and swallows and dogs that burst from the confines of their bronze eternity. Dragons are in short supply.
Over the 3,000 years of its existence, Chinese art in both form and symbolism changed far less radically than art in the West - or so it had seemed until 1986. That year saw the discovery of a sacrificial tomb in Sichuan, the province in Western China through which the Yangtze flows after leaving Tibet. At the site known as Guanghan, two large pits were found. This was no family mausoleum but the scene of some terrible catastrophe or reckoning. Below a layer of elephant tusks was a mass of broken bronze heads, and a mass of gold and jade. The most spectacular find was a huge bronze statue of a man nearly seven feet high. Jug eared, masked and with a sinister, unsmiling grin, only its curlicue base gives any hint of its "oriental" origins. Sculpture of any sort has always been rare in Chinese art and these pieces, showing human rather than mythical or animal forms, were the first hint historians had of this complex, powerful and utterly different civilisation - not lost, because never even known about.
THE London exhibition, 200 pieces in all, is very manageable and combines the unknown with the known.
Strangely, its sense of mystery does not decrease with the comparative familiarity; it just changes. Those first photographs of the terracotta army buried near the tomb of the First Emperor sent shivers down the spine. Standing in the presence just of one of them - resolute in his loyalty, six feet tall - is awe inspiring. It is hard to move away. A burial suit of an Imperial prince made of thousands of polished rectangles of sea green jade, held together with twisted gold wire, is mesmerising not only for its iridescent beauty but also for its condition, which is well nigh perfect.
There is much else, from the earliest beginnings of writing - characters written on animal bones around 1200 BC are effectively the same as those in use today - to an extraordinary set of 36 bronze bells from around 500 BC.
This exhibition is a one off, individual pieces having been brought together from museums all over China to where rightly, and in due course, they will return. Perversely, not least of my enjoyment of my visit lay in leaving ancient China only to find myself entering Assyria, Egypt and the Parthenon - all located in the same, south west corner of the museum. However appalling the theft of these great antiquities from their birthplace may be, to experience them afresh side by side with what was happening in China at the same time is an extraordinary thing, not to be missed.
