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By 400 BC La Venta, along with all the other Olmec centres, was deserted. It’s a pattern that occurs with disconcerting frequency in Central America – great population centres are suddenly, mysteriously, abandoned. In the case of the Olmecs, it could have been the overpopulation of this fragile tropical river valley, or a shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates making rivers change their course, the eruption of one of the local volcanoes, or a temporary climate change caused by the shifting patterns of the El Niño ocean current.

But elements of the Olmec culture lived on in central Mexico. The ancient city of Teotihuacan, a city founded several centuries after the mysterious collapse of the Olmec heartland, contains a great pyramid around 75 metres (some 240 feet) high. From the top of the pyramid you can see the ruins of Teotihuacan – the monumental avenues, lesser pyramids and public buildings of a city that in its day was the same size as ancient Rome. It’s a city that owes a great deal of its shape to the models provided by the Olmecs. The culture of the Olmecs is truly the cultura madre for all Central America, casting a very long shadow, establishing models and patterns that were to be followed by other cultures for centuries to come.

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Chinese Bronze Bell

Bronze bell, found in Shanxi province, China

500–400 BC

The choice of music that was played at the ceremony marking Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 was, on both sides, entirely characteristic. The British played the Last Post on a bugle; the Chinese performed a specially composed piece of music called Heaven, Earth, Mankind, part of it on a set of ancient bells. On the European side, a solo instrument connected with war and conflict; on the Chinese side, a group of instruments playing in harmony. With a little stretch of the imagination, you can see in that choice of instruments two distinct and determinant views of how society works. Bells in China go back thousands of years, and they carry great resonances for Chinese people – so perhaps this was the Chinese leaders’ way of reminding Hong Kong of the cultural and political traditions it would be rejoining. This bell is a contemporary of the ones played at that ceremony, about 2,500 years old, and through this bell I’m going to be exploring Confucius’s ideas of how a society can function in harmony.

When this bell was first played, in the fifth century BC, China was in military and political disarray, essentially just a collection of competing fiefdoms, all battling for supremacy. There was widespread social instability, but also lively intellectual debate about what an ideal society ought to be, and by far the most famous and influential contributor to these debates was Confucius. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the insecurity of the times, he placed a very high value on peace and harmony. We’re told that one of his celebrated sayings was: ‘Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.’ For Confucius, music was a metaphor of a harmonious society, and its performance could actually help bring that better society about. It’s a view of the world that still resonates strongly in China today, and it ties in with the story of our bell.

As it’s a museum piece, and of such age, we don’t play our bell very often. But it is large and very handsome to look at. It’s about the size of a beer barrel, and not circular, but elliptical. It reminds me of nothing so much as an outsized Swiss cowbell. It’s covered in decoration, elaborate strapwork that swirls all over, round medallions with dragons’ heads swallowing geese and, at the top, two magnificent standing dragons holding the handle from which the bell would have hung. This was a bell that was made not only to be heard but also to be seen.

Our bell would have originally been part of a set owned by a warlord or by a powerful official in one of the numerous small states. Owning a set of bells – and, even more, being able to afford the orchestra to play