Three thousand years ago a face appeared on the sides of China's ritual bronzes, and nobody wrote down what it was. On the taotie, the name it was given long afterwards, and why we left it as strange as we found it.
Walk through the bronze galleries of any large museum of Chinese art and there comes a moment when you start seeing it everywhere. On a wine vessel standing on three thin legs. On a great square cauldron. On the belly of a jar, on an axe blade, on the lid of a box. Two eyes, staring straight out. A pair of horns. A brow, a ridge of a nose, sometimes a jaw. And then, the longer you look, the face begins to come apart into curls and hooks and coils, and you are no longer sure where the animal ends and the pattern begins.
That is the taotie. It is one of the oldest images in Chinese art, and one of the least understood.
A face without a name
The motif reached its height under the Shang, the dynasty that ruled the middle Yellow River valley from roughly the sixteenth to the eleventh century BCE. Its roots go back further still: jades of the Liangzhu culture, on the lower Yangtze, already carry staring masks more than a thousand years earlier. But it was the Shang bronze casters who made the face monumental.
Their bronzes were not tableware. They were ritual vessels, made to hold the wine, grain and meat offered to ancestors and spirits, and they were among the most precious things a Shang lord could own. Many went into the ground with their owners. When the tomb of Lady Fu Hao, a royal consort and military commander, was opened at Anyang in 1976, it held more than four hundred bronzes, and the face looks out from vessel after vessel.
What the Shang themselves called it, we do not know. They left thousands of inscriptions on oracle bones and on the bronzes, prayers and names and dates and questions put to the ancestors, and as far as anyone has found, not one of them tells us whose face this is.
Where the name came from
The word taotie arrives much later. A book compiled in the third century BCE, the Lüshi Chunqiu, mentions in passing that the cauldrons of the Zhou carry a taotie: a head with no body, a creature that devoured people but was harmed before it could swallow them. It is offered as a small moral lesson about what greed does to the greedy.
Older still, the Zuo Zhuan uses Taotie as the name of a grasping, gluttonous villain banished in the age of the legendary sage kings. And when scholars of the Song dynasty, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, began to collect and catalogue ancient bronzes, they reached for this word to name the face. It stuck. In everyday Chinese the same word can still be used, half fondly, for someone who loves food a little too much.
So the name the whole world now uses is a later age's guess, and not a kind one. Many archaeologists prefer the plainer term "animal mask", because it promises less.
What was it, then?
No one knows, and the honest answers are interesting precisely because they disagree.
Some scholars see a deity, or the face of the spirit the offerings were meant for. Some see a guardian, set on the vessel to face whoever came near it. Some argue that the face began as pure pattern, scrolls and spirals arranged so symmetrically that two eyes appeared, and that the meaning came afterwards, if it came at all.
Others point to the way the mask so often divides. Look at it again and the single frontal face becomes two creatures in profile, nose to nose, each with its own eye, its own horn, its own long body running away to the side. One face, or two beasts meeting? On the finest bronzes it is both at once, and the doubleness seems entirely deliberate.
Behind the face there is almost always a ground of tight, squared spirals. Tradition calls it leiwen, the thunder pattern. The casters filled every remaining surface with it, so that no part of the vessel was ever left empty.
Why it still holds you
Most images of power want something from you. They glare, they threaten, they flatter. The taotie does none of these things. It has no expression we can name. It does not move. It simply faces you, perfectly symmetrical, and goes on facing you, and has done so for three thousand years.
We think that is why it outlived its own meaning. It comes back on later copies of the ancient bronzes, on door knockers and incense burners, and in folklore it was eventually counted among the nine sons of the dragon. People kept carving it because it worked as an image, long after anyone could say what it was for.
Carving a bronze in silver
When we decided to make a taotie, we had a choice. We could modernise it: soften the face, give it a little personality, make it friendlier to wear. Or we could follow the bronzes.
We followed the bronzes. Our cuff carries a single frontal mask at its centre, opening into two complete bodies that run away to the left and the right. The horns, the curling scrollwork and the small round bosses along the edges are fire-gilded in gold; everything else stays silver. Behind the beast, the thunder pattern fills every open millimetre, cut by hand and darkened, so that at arm's length it reads as texture and only becomes pattern when you bring it close.
The hardest part was the symmetry. The band is less than a centimetre wide, and it curves. Both halves of the beast have to arrive at the face at exactly the same moment or the whole thing goes crooked, and on a frontal image the eye forgives nothing. We kept the proportions of the vessels rather than the proportions of a jeweller's bangle, because a taotie that has been made pretty is no longer a taotie.
What we will and won't say
You will read in places that the taotie wards off evil or guards whoever wears it. We do not make that claim. The Shang did not leave us their reasons, and we would rather not invent new ones and sell them back to you.
What we can say is smaller, and we think truer. This is one of the oldest faces Chinese art ever made for the sacred, and it was made with complete seriousness. We tried to carve it the same way.
It does not explain itself. It only asks to be looked at.
Taotie Double-Body Bangle · Asian Mythology Jewelry
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