An Ode to the Sun and Immortal Birds (Excerpt)

Author: Sun Hua

In early 2001, when the wheel of times heralded the new century, in Jinsha Village Ruins west of Chengdu, a large quantity of precious cultural relics during the Shang and Zhou period were discovered by accident. Among them was an eye-catching piece of circular ornament hammered out with gold sheet. The center of this gold ornament is hallowed out into a vortex with twelve serrated tails, and surrounded by four carved birds flying in an anticlockwise fashion. The artifact will present the vivid pattern of four birds flying around a fireball when set on a red carpet. It embodies the Sun and Immortal Birds in ancient Chinese mythologies and is an invaluable material proof of such old legends.

In remote ages, the sun was definitely the most remarkable thing perceived by ancient people. The sun‘s rising and falling every day, its changing light and shades, overshadowing by the clouds and rains, among many other natural phenomena, were exerting great impacts upon people’s production and living. Therefore, people worshiped, celebrated, and deified the sun, making the sun god the primitive belief for many nations in the world. 

The worship of the sun and the sun god is historically shared by many nations around the globe, though in different ways. The ancient Chinese in many regions expressed their understandings of the sun god in the shape of birds, which is distinctive of Chinese characteristics.

The Sun and Immortal Birds Gold Ornament is a combination of the essential idea shared by the ancient world and an appearance unique to pre-Qin China. It is designed in a manner to deliver a rotational sense of motion with outward radiation, as well as to show a balanced sense of rhythm. Its artistic design also represents the conciseness, simplicity and abstraction of the ancient Chinese art, giving a visual effect similar to traditional paper-cutting.