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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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