From seven or eight thousand years ago and crafted in fishing settlements along the southern coast of what is today mainland China comes the earliest pottery currently known to us from there.   Bowls and large-globular jars were made from a thick gritty clay.
        Beautifully painted red earthenware pottery, some later pieces showing clear evidence of having been turned on the potter's wheel, was made by this Yangshao [Yang-hsiao] culture.  Two types of bowls were among the varied forms produced: the thin-walled bo basin with a straight mouth, and the wider and footed pen bowl [aka pan or p'an or p'un]. 1

        The Bronze Age contained the Shang and Zhou dynasties.  The former, primarily in modern day Henan, Hebei and Shandong provinces, is the first completely scientifically verifiable Chinese dynasty, alternately dated 1766-1122 B.C.E. 
        Now, with the production of bronze -- an alloy of copper and tin, or copper and certain other metals -- life took on more sophistication.  Bronze vessels made possible more civilized ways and means of preparing food, and laid the foundation for an elaborate system of etiquette and ceremonial rituals.  These became an important part of life for the ancient Shang rulers and aristocracy.  All the known major weapons had their cutting or piercing parts made of bronze.  The metal was not widely used for agricultural implements.  Bronze vessels and weapons were among the symbolic gifts bestowed upon a royal relative sent by the king to his own land to establish his own town and political domain.  When the provincial lineages became further segmented, the bronzes were again a part of the gifts handed down the aristocratic line.  They were both associated with rituals for ancestor worship and, as objects of precious materials that could only be acquired by those in control of vast technological and political machinery, they were suitable as symbols for sumptuary rule.
          The large-scale production of such technologically sophisticated bronzes must have required multistage operations by many kinds of specialists, who must have been organized and supervised by the state.  The production of bronze -- from mining, ingot smelting, transportation to foundries and workshops, guarding of the transportation routes, etc. -- depended on the presence of a social order with sufficient organization and force to generate and replenish the required reservoir of forced labor.  Bronze products, hence, assumed the role of symbols of that order and then came to reinforce it.
        These ritual bronzes, acting as a kind of "collection plate," were made for the offerings of food and wine to ancestral spirits which formed the core of the sacrificial rites.  Symbolizing the legitimacy of the aristocratic rule of chosen groups of kin, the bronzes were then buried with nobles, whose spirits were assumed to continue with the same sort of rituals after death. 2 

Late Shang	Early Zhou

        During these first centuries of the historical age, there was actually no such people as "the Chinese."  There were instead several kinds of kindred stock and common culture loosely united in a political and religious federation.  There were also other states, apparently of equal culture and certainly not of very different race, which were outside this federation.  Each of these peoples/states were groups of related tribes.
        The first known Chinese dictionary was produced around 1100 B.C.E.  A three-radical character listed was for pen, a shallow basin or large, flat, low-rimmed bowl.
        For perhaps a century after the Zhou conquest, the Shang bronze style survived, particularly in the Luoyang region of northern Henan province.  It became increasingly modified by the taste of the Zhou court.  Gradually, omepopular Shang shapes disappeared, the range of wine vessels decreased, and religious overtones vanished.  The bronze vessels -- now about fifty types -- generally have thinner walls compared to the Shang versions.   The pen water bowl became more common.  It was used for ablutions or, possibly, even to hold fruit.
        Bronzes of this period tended to be more coarsely modelled, shapes heavier, flanges large and spiky, the vessels more treasured by later Chinese connoisseurs for their inscriptions than for any beauty of form.  No other age or culture has ever equalled the craftsmanship and artistry of the finest Zhou bronzes.
        The inscriptions were markedly longer than those of the late Shang and had become veritable documents.  One particular pen bowl records events relating to the first kings of the Western Zhou dynasty (late 11th cent. -  770 B.C.E.) and the history of the Wei family.  The basin with an inscription of 284 characters was uncovered in 1976 in Shaanxi Province.  The maker of this vessel, who may have been court historian to the seventh Zhou king, names the first six kings in order and praises each for his notable deeds.  He then traces his own descent from a Shang vassal state. 3

        The allusions to an island-mountain in the sea refer to the Three Isles of the Blessed: Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou.  The legendary Chinese Immortals (hermits of perennial youth) were thought to live partly in the Western Mountains and partly on movable islands in the Eastern Sea off the coast of Shandong.  Like the Immortals themselves, these islands dissolved into mist as human travellers approached.
       The mountainous island of Penglai came to be symbolized by small temple landscapes.  By reproducing in miniature on a tray (for integrity, ease of transport, and holding of water) a realm of such religious significance, the people of earlier days gave expression to their longings for their idealized kingdom.  And from trees growing on these tiny mountain slopes came independent dwarf potted trees? 
        A second explanation traces the origins of miniature landscapes to plants raised in pots for medicinal purposes.  Plants have always played an important role in Chinese medicine, so it is easy to imagine that sooner or later someone would decide to grow plants in pots rather than go out to look for them.  After a few seasons containerized, most plants would have shown at least some degree of growth slow down and/or leaf-size reduction.  Such plants, continuously trimmed, would eventually take on such a pleasing appearance that they would begin to be raised for ornamental purposes. 
        Perhaps a rock with a natural dwarfed tree growing out of it was dug up -- or a section of rock with a plant growing in it was broken off a larger stone -- and then brought back to a garden.  There the wondrous little plant was cared for, and searches were made for other natural rock plants.  Windblown seed might also have rooted and taken hold in a pocket of a larger rockery in a garden.  Then someone decided to make one for himself, possibly using post-mortem information from a natural rock tree which had died and which, amazingly, was found to have grown and lived with roots only in a paper-thin crack or tiny hollow within the rock.  Such cramped quarters could be duplicated or improved upon in a flattened bowl, a pen, which already served to hold a small piece of mountain.
 
 

Water basin with an exotic mountainscape as backdrop.  Polychrome earthenware, Tang dynasty (618 - 907). This was perhaps the earliest physical model of an artificial hill and water pond in the history of Chinese landscaped gardens. (Source: Han, Prof. Pao-Teh  External Forms and Internal Visions, The Story of Chinese Landscape Design (Taipei: Youth Cultural Enterprise Co., Ltd.;1992), pg. 92)

       Cognizant of their true scale in and communication with Heaven and Earth, certain sages may have begun to collect and later actually make powerful concentrated representations of this relationship so as to demonstrate and maintain the balance of creation.  The utilitarian vessel which had been assigned the task of holding offerings to Heaven (or at least the water to properly cleanse oneself beforehand), was then eventually employed to define the limits of these magical miniature landscapes.

1.    Note:  all references herein to the water basin have been standardized using the spelling of "pen."  Wood, Frances A Companion to China (New York: St. Martin's Press; 1988), pp. 52-53; Fitzgerald, C.P.  China, A Short Cultural History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press; 1985), pp. 18-20, 34-36; The four line drawings of the development of pen are from Fig. 1 by Phyllis Ward in The Great Bronze Age of China, edited by Wen Fong (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 1980), pp. 4-5; Zhongmin, Han and Hubert Delahaye  (A Journey Through Ancient China; New York: Gallery Books; 1985), pp. 9, 11-12, 18-23, picture of bo on pg. 22 -- it seems to be only a linguistic coincidence that the pen (or pan) and bo were used in Banpo [Pan-p'o], the most famous and representative site which we know of from this time, a ditch-encircled twelve-acre village lasting from 5000 to 3000 B.C.E.  This was located at a spot that would eventually see a series of ever-larger settlements, culminating with the present day city of Xian; per The Chinese Exhibition, The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of the People's Republic of China (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum; 1975), pg. 14, the site was excavated between 1954 and 1957; Scarre, Chris (editor-in-chief), Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World (London: Darling Kindersley, Inc.; 1993, First American edition), pp. 70, 73, 77-79, 88-90; per "Chinese put relics' age at 7,000 years," The Arizona Republic, November 8, 1986, pg. A19, Dateline Peking, United Press International, evidence has been mounting for another civilization, the Liangzhu in southern Zhejiang province's Taihu Lake Valley region.  Lasting from perhaps 5,000 to 2,000 B.C.E., it was agriculturally based, developed experience working jade, silk, pottery, and bamboo-weaving, and had its own written language.  We need to remember that the fossil evidence of human beings in China extends back some four hundred thousand years.  It would be a terrible conceit on our part to assume that no civilization of any kind existed until the last tenth of that period just because we currently do not know of or recognize any evidence of earlier civilizations.  Archaeological finds are continually being discovered, evaluated and re-interpreted. 
       Going back to the misty origins of this art, we actually have only very sketchy and incomplete details about the lives of the ancient people mentioned herein.  Many gaps have been filled based on conjecture and comparison with more recent lives.  Those earlier peoples experienced their world in fundamentally different ways six millennia ago -- or even those of four or two thousand years past -- than we do today.  We must be careful of thinking we can really understand their concrete lives and abstract thoughts.  Their tools which have been discovered by archaeologists may have a recognizable purpose that most can agree upon, but rare are the preserved dreams and beliefs of our ancestors who may have been eminently successful in nontechnological ways.  For example, see The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.; 1994).

2.      Fitzgerald, pp. 15, 16, 21, 23, 28, 42-43, 116; Sullivan, Michael  (The Arts of China; Berkeley: University of California Press; 1984), pp. 14, 22-24, 31; Fong, pp. 45-47; Wood, pp. 53-55; Chu, Arthur and Grace Chu Oriental Antiques and Collectibles, A Guide (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.; 1973), pg. 15; Wu, Yee-Sun  Man Lung Artistic Pot Plants (Hong Kong: Wing-Lung Bank Ltd.; 1969, 1974.  Second edition), pg. 62; Koreshoff, Deborah R.  Bonsai: Its Art, Science, History and Philosophy (Brisbane, Australia: Boolarong Publications; 1984), pg. 2; Jellicoe, Sir Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe (consult. eds.) and Patrick Goode and Michael Lancaster (exec. eds.)  The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford University Press, 1986),  pg. 111; Liang, Amy The Living Art of Bonsai (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.; 1992), pg. 98; Chiu, Milton M.  The Tao of Chinese Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc.; 1984), pp. 2, 56-67; The Chinese Exhibition gives two examples of bronze pen from this time, both decorated with the kuei dragon design: B&w Plate 73 is of a vessel dating from the 16th to 11th centuries B.C.E. from Henan province, 10.5 cm high and 30 cm in diameter, and B&w Plate 103 is from 11th century B.C.E. Anhui province, 9.4 cm high and 31.6 cm in diameter; other bronze pen from the 11th and 10th centuries B.C.E. are in Watson, William Ancient Chinese Bronzes (London: Faber and Faber; 1962, 1977, Second edition), b&w fig. 26 a,b,c and 27b.

3.      Fitzgerald, pp. 15, 16, 21, 23, 28, 42-43, 116; Sullivan, pp. 14, 22-24, 31; Wood, pp. 53-55; Chu, pg. 15; Henricks, pg. 194; Fong, pg. 198; The Chinese Exhibition, pg. xiv; Wu, 2nd, pg. 62; Koreshoff, pg. 2; Jellicoe, pg. 111; Keswick, Maggie (Chinese Garden: History, Art & Architecture; New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.; 1978), pp. 31-33; Liang, pg. 98; Chiu, pp. 2, 56-67.