Ten years in the making, this study of the arts of ancient China examines the histories of jade, pottery, silk, lacquer, bronze, and display writing from the late Neolithic (fourth millennium BC) to the end of Warring States (third century BC). No text from this time bears on workshops and techniques, or on the thinking of artists; no text of any kind survives from the Neolithic. This dearth of written sources, though limiting in many ways, concentrates the mind on fundamentals: the historian must rely on archaeology and on what can be learned from the objects themselves. The works of a given time and place have features in common because of their common point of departure in what already exists. They differ from the works of the previous generation, and from one another, by choices and changes made by artists and their patrons. Many things condition the patron’s demands, and many more condition the artist’s response, but all external factors, from passing fashion to royal mandate to metal shortages, act through individuals, with consequences that are never wholly predictable. Constructing an explanatory history of works of art—making sense of them—thus depends on finding access to the thinking of individuals, whether their names are known or not. When plausible predecessors for a work can be found, they offer a way into the thinking behind it, for its departures from them reflect decisions, conscious or unconscious. The last half century of Chinese archaeology has vastly improved the prospects of such an investigation by bringing to light an undreamt-of wealth of material from datable and otherwise informative contexts. Most of the works illustrated in this book were still underground in 1970. No book written in that year could undertake what Bagley and Wang have attempted. No book written now could hope to be comprehensive or definitive, for excavation continues apace. But for scholars and amateurs alike, the works examined here, full of surprises, amount to a new world, one with the power to enlarge our conception of the possibilities of art.