The forty-one-character inscription inside the neck of this container—there is an identical one on a similar vessel in the Palace Museum, Taipei—is famous for being the first to mention the recycling of earlier bronzes in order to make other vessels. The older bronzes were melted down at the behest of Yi, a nobleman who lived in south central China, near today’s Wuhan in Hubei province. The inscription in the container continues, explaining that Yi’s vessel held “ritual wine for entertaining guests. May his virtue be without flaw; thereby being filial, thereby feasting [ancestors], and thereby being given long life. May his descendants thereby receive limitless great blessings.” The “wine” was a grain-based alcoholic beverage.
The style of their bronzes shows that the people of the Zhou dynasty modified many of the traditions they inherited from Shang artisans. Where Shang containers are often elegant in shape, Zhou vessels become more squat and massive while the bold, animal-based decoration of the earlier objects gradually yields to designs of a more abstract and fluid nature, like the wavy grooves that encircle this container. The numerous creatures of earlier times are here reduced to two: a small head holding a ring on either side of the neck.
Yi, the earl of Zeng, used auspicious metal from old vessels and he made this pot. . . .
—Inscription, about 800 BCE
