Introduction

The Dawning East -Collections from the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods

This is an era featured by vitality and dynamism, an era blessed with exquisite craftsmanship and delicate innovation and an era where Chinese civilization and traditional culture took shape. The old institution was abolished while the new order established, revealing the dawning in the east.    
 
240 pieces of precious cultural relics from 30 cultural institutions and museums nationwide are collected for this exhibition to help the visitors get a deeper understanding of the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Period which was a time of great historic transformations from a grand narrative perspective. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period (770 to 221 BC) spanning over 500 years, played a vital role in Chinese history when profound changes and turbulences mixed up with great advances and integration. Despite complicated historic lines during the period, the exhibition, by making painstaking and scrupulous research on the historical records, decided to tell what happened in the east from political, economic and cultural aspects. The period was also called by the famous German scholar Karl Jaspers as the “Axial Age” of human civilization.