About 10,000 years ago, China entered the Neolithic Age, during which people began farming and making pottery for the first time. In the National Museum of China, there is one mysterious and imaginative pottery piece, which is so valuable that it is listed as one of the artifacts forbidden to be exhibited abroad. The important discovery was found at the Banpo village in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, in 1955. The pottery is designed into a basin shape. The interior wall of the pottery is painted two sets of symmetrical human face-and-fish motifs. The patterns are outlined in black against the red clay. The human face on the basin is round with the left side of the forehead painted black and the right side in semicircle. Two horizontal lines represent a pair of eyes. On both sides of the mouth and ears are the patterns of two fishes. Showing the fantastic imagination of the craftsmen, the artifact is a masterpiece of ancient pottery, a representation of aesthetics and a symbol of the era. The basin doesn't function as a bowl for washing. Instead, it is a lid of an urn in which dead children were stored. In the primitive society, our ancestors had very limited ability to cope with diseases and natural disasters. When their children were dying, there was nothing more the parents could do but preparing urns for them and praying for their souls.🙏🙏🙏