Session 129: Reading Tombs: A Liao Dynasty Family Cemetery at Xuanhua

Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Hung Wu, University of Chicago

Keywords: Liao dynasty, funerary art, death ritual.

For hundreds and even thousands of years people constructed tombs and furnished them in ways that reflected their distinct beliefs, cultural traditions, and artistic tastes. More than any other type of historical remains, ancient tombs are now major sources of previously untransmitted knowledge; their excavations have yielded invaluable evidence for advancing individual branches of historical inquiry. The use of such evidence in different disciplines, however, also necessarily vitiates the tomb’s cultural and artistic integrity: when an ancient tomb is taken as a deposit of fragmentary information for individual fields, its own purpose and history become obscured.

At the center of this panel are two large questions: How do we study a tomb or cemetery constructed as a whole, including architecture, objects, murals, inscriptions, and the remains of the deceased? And how do we deduce evidence from such synthetic studies to understand the culture, religion, and art of the tomb occupants or builders? To foreground methodological issues, the four papers will focus on the Zhang family tombs of the Liao dynasty in Xuanhua, Hebei province, which are well-preserved and documented, and which lend themselves to detailed analysis. Each paper will deal with a specific aspect of these tombs and develop a particular interpretative strategy. The papers will therefore interact historically as well as methodologically. It is hoped that such interaction will encourage more systematic studies of tombs of different periods and places.

Cultivating the Body for Afterlife

Hsueh-man Shen, Seattle Asian Art Museum

Texts from medieval China, ranging from Buddhist scriptures to stories and painting, are not short of records about the body. This paper focuses on the representation and presentation of the body in Liao tombs and raises questions about body that concerned the Liao people. Examples come principally from the cremated tombs excavated in Xuanhua, Hebei province.

This paper will show that a deposit made inside a figural image is the essence of life. By inserting bodily remains of the deceased into dolls that bore a physical resemblance to the deceased, the dead bodies, which were needed for post-mortem immortality in the afterlife, were retrieved. Such a practice represents a distinctive hybrid of the Chinese tomb traditions and Buddhist ideas, which together are somewhat contradictory by nature. It also effectively negates the distinction made between representation and presentation.

Given that the deceased remain alive in their bodies, the tomb chambers became a space where the deceased continues to gain merits and cultivate his body. Once sufficient merits have been accumulated and his body refined, the tomb occupant would be ultimately exempted from death—a goal that can be reached through immortality, rebirth in the Buddhist paradise, or entry into nirvana. The tomb occupant would thus be able to leave the tomb forever. The concept of purgatory developed in China since the late Tang dynasty undoubtedly played an important role in this shift of the character of Chinese tombs.

Preparing Sutra and Tea: Interpreting Liao Dynasty Tomb Murals at Xuanhua

Qingquan Li, Guangdong Academy of Fine Arts

A tomb is the idealized residence of the dead. Every element of a tomb—from architecture to murals, and from coffins to tomb furnishings—belongs to a purposefully constructed whole. Through examining the interrelationship of these elements, it is possible to uncover hidden concepts behind a tomb’s design and to understand the contemporary social and cultural milieu.

Previous studies have assumed that murals depicting tea-preparation in the Liao tombs at Xuanhua are reflections of a general tea-drinking culture at the time. My research, however, has led me to connect these images with another important painting subject in the tombs—sutra-preparation. The two types of mural are spatially connected: figures in the tea-preparation murals always guide the viewer toward a table supporting sutra scrolls, brush, and ink. Checking historical records, we find that during the eighth to ninth centuries, a Buddhist ritual combining tea-drinking and sutra-chanting spread from Shandong to Hebei. Inscriptions found in the Xuanhua tombs identify the tomb occupants as Buddhist believers. For example, epitaphs stress that the deceased chanted a great number of sutras when they were living, and the dhāranīs sutra copied on the cinerary caskets promise that the deceased would be liberated from purgatory and reborn in the Pure Land. In Mahayana Tantrism, chanting and copying Buddhist sutras provides an important means for the departed soul to reach transcendence. This idea is expressed by the sutra-preparation murals. Because drinking tea could help chanters concentrate on recitation, it became an integral part of the ritual and was also considered a means to achieve immortality.

A Cemetery of Iconoclash: Revisiting the Liao Tombs at Xuanhua, Hebei

Hsingyuan Tsao, University of British Columbia

Visual materials from the tombs of the Zhang family cemetery in Xuanhua often clash and conflict with the ethnicity and cultural tradition of the tombs’ occupants. Cultural ethnicity is commonly believed to identify races and other large groups of people who share a common nationality, traits, customs, and/or cultural tradition. The materials from the tombs, however speak of a more complex situation in which iconoclash became the norm of visual culture for this special community.

This paper investigates how the ethnic Chinese in Xuanhua under Qidan rule (946–1125) survived the cultural conflicts of that period, as well as how these ethnic Chinese transformed the various clashing elements and merged them into a third type of cultural existence, a type of culture that is neither Chinese nor Qidan but that is both. Cultural accommodations, negotiations, and compromises, rather than wars, guided the members of the Zhang families’ social life, including religion, social customs, fashion, morals, art, burial practices, and even their material environment. Archaeological data from the tombs show them responding to individuals and circumstances; commemorating the dead; how they ate and dressed; as well as their living arrangements. All of these are determined by their traditional (Chinese), religious (Buddhist), and political (Qidan) heritage.

Individual Tomb or Family Cemetery: How to Best Read the Xuanhua Tombs?

Nancy S. Steinhardt, University of Pennsylvania

This paper focuses on the group of tombs in Xuanhua as a means of exploring methodologies for the study of Liao cemeteries and grouped tombs more generally. From the announcement of the tomb of Zhang Shiqing, it was certain that we might be able to understand star configurations in early twelfth-century North China and which Buddhist texts were being read at that time. Yet even with one tomb, instinctively research turned to other Liao tombs, notably those in Qingzhou, more than 1,000 kilometers east, and those emerging from excavations in Kulunqi, near the Mongolia-Jilin border.

Fifteen years later, researchers learned about two more dated tombs with occupants named Zhang in Xuanhua, both with star groups on their ceilings. Research focus shifted to the Zhang family cemetery and from star groups to ceiling mandalas. Increasingly ambitious research was underway at Kulunqi.

We now know that not every ceiling in a Xiabali tomb had an extraordinary ceiling and not every tomb occupant was a devout Buddhist. Range is also apparent among the Kulunqi tombs. Should we be focused on studying cemeteries, especially family cemeteries, or should we try to maintain focus on extraordinary tombs?

This paper will propose alternate scenarios for what we accomplish and lose by investigating individual tombs vs. cemeteries. The last section of the paper will explore if our desire to see tombs as parts of cemeteries is grounded in royal necropolises since the Shang; in the documented relationship between royal cemeteries and cities; and if these views enhance or detract from the study of funerary patterns of non-Chinese people.