MID-TO LATE WARRING STATES PERIOD, MID-4TH CENTURY-221 BC

These plain tapering cylindrical vessels form a nesting set. They fit together perfectly, all within the largest one that also has a cover with coiled ridges and a small loop hole at the center. Sets of nesting beakers in bronze are exceedingly rare. Only one closely comparable example appears to be recorded: a Warring States–period assemblage excavated from Chu tomb no. 1 at Jiuliandun, Zaoyang, Hubei, and illustrated by Fan J. Zhang and Jay Xu in Phoenix Kingdoms: The Last Splendor of China’s Bronze Age (San Francisco, 2022), p. 215, no. 151. A gilt-bronze cylindrical vessel decorated with lozenge pattern, which has a similar shape to the present beakers, but with a less tapered body, was found in the Western Han burial of Liu Sheng, the Prince of Zhongshan Principality in Mancheng, Heibei Province and is illustrated in Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan Kaogu Yanjiusuo and Hebei Sheng Wenwu Guanlichu ed., Mancheng Han mu fajue baogao [Excavation of the Han Tombs at Man-cheng], Beijing, 1980, p. 78. The same burial also had a nine-bowl nesting set illustrated in ibid., p. 60. These related examples indicate that vessels of similar shape and bronze nesting sets continued to be made even into the Western Han period.