Jue (vessel) in the context of "Taotie"

A jue (Chinese: 爵; Wade–Giles: chüeh) is a type of ancient Chinese ritual bronze vessel used to serve warm wine during ancestor-worship ceremonies. It takes the form of an ovoid body supported by three splayed triangular legs, with a long curved spout (liu 流) on one side and a counterbalancing flange (wei 尾) on the other. Many examples have one or two loop handles (pan 鋬) on the side and two column-shaped protuberances (zhu 柱) on the top of the vessel, which were probably used to enable the vessel to be lifted using leather straps. They are often ornately decorated with taotie decorations representing mythical beasts. They are in effect a small Chinese equivalent of the ewer. The name jue is not original, but derives from the Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary of the 2nd century AD.

The vessel originated in Neolithic times as a pottery ware associated with the Longshan culture, between about 2500-2000 BC. During the Shang and Zhou dynasties of Bronze Age China, it became one of a number of designs of Chinese ritual bronzes. Pottery and lead copies continued to be made and used as grave goods or spirit utensils (mingqi). Most jue (like other Chinese bronzes) were created by casting molten metal in pottery moulds, but one jue appears to have been made using the much earlier method of hammering sheet metal that might have been introduced from western Asia, where bronze metallurgy is believed to have been developed 2,000 years before it appeared in China.