A branch of the Yang-Shao culture of Neolithic China with a distinctive painted pottery, c 2500-2000 BC. There are extensive cemeteries in the hills of the upper Yellow River basin in Kansu province which yielded great quantities of the pottery with inhumation burials. The most common were large globular urns painted with bold spiral or other curvilinear designs or lozenges in red, black, purple, or brown. The 'death pattern' consists of a red band between two black ones internally fringed. The geometric patterns or stylized figures are of men, fish, and birds; there is no glaze. Coiling was common, but some of the wares were probably shaped on a slow, or hand-turned, wheel. The handles are set low on the body of the urns, and the lower part of the body is left undecorated - as with most Greek Proto-Geometric funerary ware, to which there is a certain likeness. Striking parallels have been found in Turkestan, the Caucasus, and the Ukraine.