Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China (review)

Reviews 455 Leaving aside the issue ofhow to characterize the nature of Christian missions in modern China, a reader looking for new, insider perspectives on mission life and structure will also be disappointed. There is very little ofthat here. And on the few occasions when Espey does touch on them, the uninitiated in mission matters would miss the significance ofthe reference. For example, in "The Promised Land," he writes whimsically about the two home institutions supporting his parents' mission in China, the Foreign Mission Board ofthe Presbyterian Church in New York City and the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and their financial relationship, but the tone completely masks the very real tensions that existed among the various fundraising agencies of the American Protestant churches. No, the value of this collection lies elsewhere, as the subtitle foretells us, in the reconstruction of "A China Mission Boyhood." It is the story of growing up in another culture and of the very personal and very human dramas that this entails . The author describes his home life within the mission compound, his years at the Shanghai American School, and his encounters with the city ofShanghai, the three distinct worlds ofhis early years that were linked only by his movement in and out of them and not by the coincidence ofa common geographic location (Shanghai). As he moves retrospectively among these worlds, the author treats us to one delightful tale after another, providing his fellow travelers with funny yet perceptive vignettes of a place and time that has changed forever. Lawrence D. Kessler University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill Lothar von Falkenhausen. Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture ofBronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xxvi, 481 pp. Hardcover $70.00. In 1978, a small construction project in Sui County near Wuhan uncovered a Warring States tomb belonging to the Marquis Yi ofZeng. The tomb was richly provided with a range ofartifacts, by far the most notable ofwhich were over one hundred musical instruments. Among these, a collection ofchime sets was discovered that exceeded anything previously found in China. Sixty-five bells were© 1995 by University' " ' ' ofHawai'iPresssuspended from a three-tiered, L-shaped frame. Thebells were in excellent condition , fully playable, and they included as well some four thousand characters of inscription, providing insight into the burial situation, the interstate relations, 456 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 and the musical systems and theory oflate Zhou China. An especially important feature ofthe inscriptions is what von Falkenhausen calls "equivalency formulas," in which the tonal systems ofother states are equated to Zeng's. Based on the inscription ofa large round bo bell, given to the Marquis Yi by his neighbor Chu King Hui, the burial is reliably dated in the late fifth century b.c. In the decade following the discovery, Chinese archaeologists published a steady stream of articles on the tomb, its objects, and especially the bell set. The inscriptions confirmed important technical features of early bells, most notably their two-tone capability, and this awakened new interest in the substantial collections ofbronze bells that had heretofore been unearthed in China. Within a decade ofthis discovery, von Falkenhausen engaged the subject ofMarquis Yi's bell set and early Chinese bronze bells generally in his dissertation work at Harvard University under the direction ofK. C. Chang. This book builds on von Falkenhausen's voluminous dissertation, submitted five years earlier, which concentrated on the typology ofbronze bells in China and a range of technical aspects in their manufacture and style. In Suspended Music, von Falkenhausen's knowledge ofearly Chinese bronze bells is put into a historical context, with a refinement and expansion ofhis arguments about the social and political use ofbells, ritual music, and ritual activity, as well as a sharpening of the discussion of their acoustical and technical achievement. The study opens with a review ofthe economic significance, social framework , and ritual use ofbells, establishing their importance in the highly regulated sumptuary practices ofpre-imperial China. The following sections, constituting the bulk ofthe book, describe and analyze in a very comprehensive manner the material aspects ofbronze bells. First, von Falkenhausen describes the shape and acoustical properties, the manufacture, the historical...