FOUND.(The Talk of the Town)

The new exhibition in the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"China: Dawn of a Golden Age"--opens with a beautiful parade of bronze figures. There are fourteen horses, four chariots, ten human riders, and three attendants on foot. Each object stands less than two feet tall, and the horses are remarkably detailed: alert eyes, flared mouths, intricate saddles. The bronzes were tomb offerings, and they date to the third century, at the end of the Han dynasty. The Met's display caption includes a single sentence describing the artifacts' rediscovery, in 1969: "They were found in Wuwei, Gansu, in northwest China, in the tomb of a senior official, probably the governor of the province."

The passive tense is appropriate: artifacts were found. Chinese archeologists distinguish between two types of excavation: zhudong and beidong, "active" and "passive." An active excavation is deliberate, planned, and relatively rare. Throughout the past century, it's been far more common for important discoveries to occur purely by chance. A construction project stumbles upon an ancient city; a peasant digs clay and accidentally uncovers a forgotten tomb. It's essentially Taoist: the effectiveness of non-action. You're most likely to find treasures when you're not searching for them.

The Met show purports to explore the idea of cultural exchange--China's early contacts with the world to the west. There are more than three hundred artifacts, most of them on loan from Chinese institutions, and the pieces span the period from 200 to 750 A.D. Many reflect Central Asian influence; some even have Roman motifs. But from another perspective the show is a monument to the chaotic energy of modern China; the majority of the objects were discovered through passive excavations. A particularly large percentage appeared during the past twenty years, as the booming Chinese economy turned cities into construction sites. And before the boom there were other campaigns, other cultural exchanges.

The parade of bronze figures, for example, was rediscovered in Wuwei, a dusty, forgotten town where locals are usually happy to talk to outsiders. A couple of years ago, I asked Tian Zhicheng, then the curator of the Wuwei museum, to tell the story behind the bronzes, of which the most famous piece is known as the "Flying Horse" (that particular object is not included in the Met exhibit). Tian said that the artifacts had been discovered accidentally, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

"They found the horse on September 23, 1969," he said. "Marshal Lin Biao had told the Chinese people that they ...