Busacca Gallery

This is a remarkable excavated bronze. It is a 3 legged vessel from Thanh Hao province in Vietnam. Unique 3 legged bronze vessel believed to be dated between 500BC - 300 AD. I was excavated in the Thanh Hoa province in Vietnam and comes from the Dong Son culture. It is slightly mis-shapen due to age. Extraordinary green patina. The Đông Sơn culture was a prehistoric Bronze Age age in Vietnam centered at the Red River Valley of northern Vietnam. At this time the first Vietnamese kingdoms of Van Lang and Au Lac appeared. Its influence flourished to other parts of Southeast Asia, including the Indo-Malayan Archipelago from about 1000 BC to 1 BC. The Dong Son people, also known as Lac or Lac Viet were skilled at cultivating rice, keeping buffaloes and pigs, fishing and sailing with long dug-out canoes. They also were skilled bronze casters, as can be seen in the famous Dong Son drums, which have been found widely in Southeast Asia and the lower reaches of southern China. Bronze figurine, Dong Son culture, 500 BCE-300CE. Thailand. The Dong Son culture is linked to the Tibeto-Burman culture, the Dai culture in Yunnan and Laos, the Mon-Khmer cultures and the culture associated with the Plain of Jars in Laos. Similar artifacts have been found in Cambodia along the Mekong River dating back to the 4th millennium B.C. Dong Son influence is seen throughout South-East Asia, from the moko drum of Alor, Indonesia (suspected of originating with Dong Son bronze drums) to the design of keris knife.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_bronze

The people of Vietnam regained independence and broke away from China in AD 938 after their victory at the battle of Bạch Đằng River. Successive dynasties flourished along with geographic and political expansion deeper into Southeast Asia, until it was colonized by the French in the mid-19th century.

The area now known as Vietnam has been inhabited since Paleolithic times, and some archaeological sites in Thanh Hóa Province purportedly date back several thousand years. Archaeologists link the beginnings of Vietnamese civilization to the late Neolithic, Early Bronze Age, Phung Nguyen culture, which was centered in Vĩnh Phúc Province of contemporary Vietnam from about 2000 to 1400 BCE.

Many small, ancient copper mine sites have been found in northern Vietnam. Some of the similarities between the Dong-Sonian sites and other Southeast Asian sites include the presence of boat-shaped coffins and burial jars, stilt dwellings, and evidence of the customs of betel-nut-chewing and teeth-blackening.









Bronzes (simplified Chinese: 青铜器; traditional Chinese: 青銅器; pinyin: qīng tóng qì; Wade-Giles: ch'ing t'ong ch'i) are some of the most important pieces of Chinese art, warranting an entire separate catalogue in the Imperial art collections. The Chinese Bronze Age began in the Xia Dynasty, and bronze ritual containers form the bulk of the collection of Chinese antiques, reaching its zenith during the Zhou Dynasty. The appreciation, creation and collection of Chinese bronzes as pieces of art and not as ritual items began in the Song Dynasty and reached its zenith in the Qing Dynasty in the reign of the Qianlong emperor, whose massive collection is recorded in the catalogues known as the Xiqing gujian and the Xiqing jijian (西清繼鑑). Within those two catalogues, the bronzeware is categorized according to use:



In China, the greatest part of discovered and preserved bronze items was not forged to ploughs or swords but cast to sacrificial vessels. Even a great part of weapons had a sacrificial meaning like daggers and axes that symbolized the heavenly power of the ruler. The strong religious sense of bronze objects brought up a great number of vessel types and shapes which became so typically that they should be copied as archaic style receptacles with other materials like wood, jade, ivory or even gold until the 20th century.



The ritual books of old China minutely describe who was allowed to use what kinds of sacrificial vessels and how much. The king of Zhou was favoured to use 9 dings and 8 gui vessels, a duke was allowed to use 7 dings and 6 guis, a baron could use 5 dings and 3 guis, a nobleman was allowed to use 3 dings and 2 guis.