Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-76mfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-17T20:05:43.485Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A foreign policy of benevolence: reinvestigating identities and material culture in the handscroll Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute 胡茄十八拍

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2025

Mia Ye Ma
Mia Ye Ma*
Affiliation:
Assistant Curator, Hong Kong Palace Museum, Hong Kong
*
Email: yemaye122@outlook.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article adopts a social constructivist approach to reinvestigate the Song-Liao relations that were manifested in the handscroll Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute 胡茄十八拍. Instead of offering a visual analysis of each of the 18 scenes in succession, it will point out the shared cultural practices and connotations of identity in the contrasting depictions of Song urban life and the nomad encampment. It argues that the handscroll probably represents the conservative faction's benevolent attitude towards nomadic tribes in the late Northern Song period, which is also likely to have been associated with the rise of Neo-Confucianism.

Keywords

Song court paintingSong-Liao material culturevisual construction of identitiesSong-Liao relationssocial constructivist approach

Information

Type
Article
Information
Bulletin of SOAS , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , June 2025 , pp. 387 - 412
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Tao Jing-shen, Two Sons of Heaven: Studies in Sung-Liao Relations (Tucson, 1988), 25.

2 Robert Rorex and Wen Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi: A Fourteenth-Century Handscroll in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1974), 1.

3 Rorex and Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi, p. 4.

4 Julia K. Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Honolulu, 2007), 81.

5 Rorex and Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi, 6.

6 Huiping Pang, “Tangyin de pozhan: You matun tangyin zhiyi Boshidun ben Huqieshibapai tuce zhi banben niandai” 燙印的破綻：由馬臀燙印質疑波士頓本胡茄十八拍圖冊之版本年代 (Branded horses: decoding the Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Palace Museum Journal 故宮博物院院刊 2, 2004, 77–91.

7 Hui Yu, “A study of Ch'en Chi-Chih's treaty at the Pien Bridge”, in Cary Y. Liu and Dora C. Y. Ching (eds), Arts of the Sung and Yüan: Ritual, Ethnicity, and Style in Painting (Princeton, 1999), 164.

8 Robert Rorex, “Some Liao tomb murals and images of nomads in Chinese paintings of the Wenchi story”, Artibus Asiae 45, 1984, 174–98. Also see Linda Cooke Johnston, “The wedding ceremony for an imperial Liao princess”, Artibus Asiae 44, 1983, 107–44.

9 Anonymous, Xuanhe huapu (Hangzhou, 2012), 37.

10 Also see Johnston, “The wedding ceremony”, 112. It discusses saddles and horse equipment that are purely pastoral in nature.

11 Irene S. Leung, “The frontier imaginary in the Song Dynasty (960–1279): revisiting Cai Yan's ‘barbarian captivity’ and return”, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2001, 8.

12 Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 20.

13 Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule, 21.

14 Tuo tuo 脫脫, Liao shi 遼史 (Beijing, 1974), juan 45, 685.

15 Tao, Two Sons of Heaven, 24.

16 Tao, Two Sons of Heaven, 31.

17 Tuo tuo, Songshi 宋史, (Beijing, 1977), juan 186, 4564.

18 Tuo tuo, Songshi, 4563.

19 Murray, Mirror of Morality, p. 81.

20 Peter Kees Bol, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China (Stanford, 1992), 252.

21 Ari Daniel Levine, Divided by A Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China (Honolulu, 2008), 3.

22 Robert E. Harrist, Painting and Private Life in Eleventh Century China: Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 13.

23 Yu Hui, Yinyou yu qujian 隱憂與曲諫 (Beijing, 2015), 31.

24 Harrist, Painting and Private Life, 13.

25 Shao Bowen 邵伯溫, Henan Shaoshi wenjian houlu 河南邵氏聞見後錄 (Shanghai, 2012), 65.

26 Leung, “The frontier imaginary in the Song dynasty”, 25.

27 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford, 1999), 7.

28 Christine A. Hastorf, The Social Archaeology of Food: Thinking about Eating from Prehistory to the Present (Cambridge, 2016), 219.

29 Ruth M. Van Dyke, Practicing Materiality (Tucson, 2015), 5.

30 Robert D. Mowry, China's Renaissance in Bronze: The Robert H. Clague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 (Phoenix, 1993), 8.

31 Jessica Rawson, Chinese Bronze: Art and Ritual (London, 1987), 3–9.

32 Chengyuan Ma, Ancient Chinese Bronze, (ed.) Shih Hsio-yen (Hong Kong; Oxford, 1986), 91.

33 Mowry, China's Renaissance in Bronze, 11.

34 Rorex and Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi, 20.

35 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Emperor Huizong (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 262.

36 Mowry, China's Renaissance in Bronze, p. 12.

37 Cornell University Johnson Museum of Art: http://museum.cornell.edu/collections/asian-pacific/china/wine-ewer-and-warming-bowl-qingbai-ware (last accessed 18 July 2017).

38 Yuanlao Meng 孟元老, Dongjing Menghua lu zhu (Beijing, 1959), 54.

39 Hans Bielenstein, Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World 589–1276 (Leiden; Boston, 2005), 570.

40 Ye Longli 葉隆禮, Qidan Guozhi 契丹國志 (Beijing, 2014), juan 21, 267.

41 Stacey Pierson, “The movement of Chinese ceramics: appropriation in global history”, Special issue of Journal of World History 23/1, 2012, 9.

42 Anita Chung, “The Jiehua tradition”, in Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Qing China (Honolulu, 2004), 21.

43 Jiren Feng, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual (Hong Kong, 2012), 101.

44 Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation (New York, 1992), 210.

45 Clarence Eng, Colours and Contrast Ceramic Tradition in Chinese Architecture (Leiden; Boston, 2015), 76.

46 Eng, Colours and Contrast, 159.

47 Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Liao Architecture (Honolulu, 1997), 127.

48 François Louis, “The palace concert and Tang material culture”, Notes in the History of Art 24/2, Winter 2005, 42.

49 Cui Lingqin 崔令欽, Jiaofang ji 教坊記 (Beijing, 2012), 56.

50 Yixing Hao 郝懿行, Er ya, Guang ya, Fang yan, Shi ming Qing shu si zhong he kan 爾雅、廣雅、方言、釋名清疏四種合刊 (Shanghai, 1989), 67.

51 Cui, Jiaofang ji, 92.

52 Louis, “The palace concert”, 42.

53 Robin R. Wang, “Virtue 德 (de) talent 才 (cai) beauty 色 (se): authoring a full-fledged womanhood in Lienüzhuan 烈女轉 (Biographies of woman)”, in Peter D. Hershock and Roger T. Ames (eds), Confucian Culture of Authority (Albany, 2006), 93.

54 Wang, “Virtue 德 (de) talent 才(cai) beauty 色 (se)”, 94.

55 F. W. Mote, Imperial China 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 161.

56 Mote, Imperial China, 162.

57 Mote, Imperial China, 82.

58 Mote, Imperial China, 163.

59 Rorex and Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi, 48.

60 Mote, Imperial China, 164.

61 Mote, Imperial China, 181.

62 Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule, 78.

63 A discussion on Sima Guang's writings on family life and the Neo-Confucian views on women and family property can be found in Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History (London, 2003), 12–38.

64 Maxwell K. Hearn, Cultivated Landscapes. Chinese Paintings from the Collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill (New York; New Haven, 2002), 5.

65 Rorex and Fong, The Story of Lady Wen-Chi, 20.

66 Michel Courtois, Chinese Painting, (trans.) Paul Eve (London, 1970), 59.

67 Caron Smith, The Fan Kuan Tradition in Chinese Landscape Painting (Ann Arbor, 1994), 518.

68 Smith, The Fan Kuan Tradition, 519.

69 Smith, The Fan Kuan Tradition, 519.