The Mongols are a people with a long history and a unique culture. It is also a nomadic people who dominate the Mongolian plateau after the Xiongnu, Donghu, Xianbei, Turkic, Khitan and Jurchen peoples. Mongolian folk art has a long history, rich and colorful, with a strong grassland atmosphere and distinct national characteristics. In its heyday, during the time of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, it spanned Europe and Asia, connecting China and the West. The Mongolian nation has made important contributions to the exchange and development of Eastern and Western cultures.
The majestic Yinshan Mountains stretch across central Inner Mongolia. The northern ethnic minorities who have lived here have left behind their glorious ancient cultures. When the Mongols came to the stage of history, they also accepted the rich cultural heritage left by other ethnic groups. At the same time, it also varies according to time, place and conditions. Due to the same geographical and geographical environment, the production and lifestyle of the nomadic peoples, many of the basic characteristics of this grassland culture have been passed down from generation to generation and have been preserved for thousands of years. In the process of this cultural inheritance and mutation, folk art rooted in the people has a relative stability. This has been confirmed by a growing body of archaeological and folklore material.
The Yin Mountains and Helan Mountains are treasure houses of folk art created by ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer tribesmen. It is also the cradle of folk art in the northern grassland culture. Here, tens of thousands of petroglyphs were created, depicting a large-scale historical gallery. In 1974, a large number of bronze ornaments characterized by animal ornaments created and used by the two nomadic peoples of the Xiongnu and Donghu (archaeologically the former is called Ordos-style bronze culture, the latter is called Xiajiadian upper culture) excavated in Yulongtai, Zungar Banner, Yimeng, both artistic conception and production technology have reached a perfect level. It also pushed folk art to a mature period. The emergence of this bronze culture marks a turning point in the development of the nomadic society of the steppe and marks a leap in social productivity. The "Ordos bronze culture" had a great influence on the later Xianbei, Mongolian, and ancient civilizations throughout Eurasia.
Numerous Liao tomb murals and precious Yuan tomb murals, as well as a large number of funerary artifacts unearthed during this period, show the trajectory of the evolution of folk art such as clothing and saddle craft in the nomadic culture of the grassland. From the pottery ornaments excavated from the Zhao Baogou culture and the Hongshan culture about 5,000 years ago to the repeated echoes, cloud patterns, horn patterns, and animal patterns in the lower and upper cultural artifacts excavated from Xiajiadian three or four thousand years ago, until the folk art patterns commonly used by modern Mongolians are all in the same line. Modern Mongolian people still use these patterns extensively in their clothing, food, shelter and travel, and they exist in various ways in their daily lives. These patterns have also become the most typical decorative forms of the Mongols, forming a special national characteristic. For thousands of years, these patterns have maintained relatively stable characteristics, and these characteristics have also played an active role in the development of folk art. The origin of mongolian folk art pattern art has also been well found in archaeological excavations.
Folk art is a material culture in life. From its origins to today, it has always had the duality of matter and spirit. It not only satisfies the needs of the people's material life in all aspects of clothing, food, housing and transportation, but also has the artistic value of satisfying spiritual needs, and at the same time has its traditionality, which satisfies people's spiritual requirements for beauty. We can use archaeological materials to compare with the current Mongolian folk art from the aspects of Mongolian costumes, embroidery, architecture, saddles and other plastic arts, paintings and folk art patterns, and peek into the origin of Mongolian folk art.
trappings
The costumes of the Mongols are mainly Mongolian robes. The early costume style was single, and the "Black Tartar Chronicle" said: "Its clothes are on the right side, the Collar of the Taoist Clothes, a few are square collars, made of leather, leather, and drapery, the clothes are fat, the floor is long, the winter clothes are two coats, one fur is inward, one fur is outward, and the styles of men and women are similar." The style of the Mongolian robe at this stage can be seen from the archaeological objects:
In the summer of 1982, the mural of the tomb of Liang Yuan, a man and a woman in the YuanbaoShan District of Chifeng City, found, sat facing each other. The man is on the left, wearing a blue robe on the right and wearing a dome-style hat; the hostess is on the right, wearing a purple robe on the left, with a dark blue cardigan.
In 1984, the excavation of Mingshui Township in Ulanchabu Mengdamao Banner cleaned up the tombs of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty and unearthed a complete robe. According to experts, it should be the burial place of the Mongol Wanggubu before the founding of genghis Khan. The robe is brownish yellow, with a collar, a fat mop, fine workmanship, exquisite clothing, a belt to tighten the waist, and the robe is embroidered with decorative patterns based on various flowers and plants.
From the era of the above excavated cultural relics, we can see the trajectory of the inheritance and evolution of the mongolian plateau nomads in terms of clothing.
The costumes of the Mongolian highland nomadic peoples are characterized by a heavy emphasis on the head, chest and waist and a belt, boots on the feet, and hair braided on the left side. The Book of Zhou and the Turks says, "Turks, their hair on the left side, the Huns of Judea." The Xianbei people of Shi Zai "wore their hair on the left side, so they were called Suotou". This costume of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Turkic tribes was inherited by the Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols and continued into this century. Some of these forms vary slightly, with the left robe becoming the right robe and the shawl becoming a bun or braid. This kind of attire can be seen on the transparent carved bronze ornaments of the Xiongnu Tomb No. 140 in Keshengzhuang, Shaanxi Province, and the portrait bricks of the Wei and Jin Tombs in Jiayuguan.
The belt is the traditional costume of the nomadic people and has a long history. The "Golden Xu Ribbon" and "Xianbei Guoluo Belt" recorded in the Xiongnu biography of the "Records of History" and the "Book of Han" are the early forms of the belt. The modern Mongol belt inherits this custom. The belt harness is a need for horseback peoples to ride, and it is also an important decoration.
Heavy headdresses, earrings, and necklaces are also the traditional customs of nomadic peoples. At the same time, the metal inlays and other crafts of the nomadic people have also evolved. Headdresses, earrings, necklaces are not only ornaments, but also their practical value, and more importantly, they also reflect the social status, dignity and wealth of individuals.
Although the Mongol rulers were briefly unified after the defeat of the Yuan Shun Emperor in 1368 and the fall of the Manchu Qing in 1911, the Mongol nation as a whole lost centralized rule. The nomadic tribes are relatively independent politically and economically. One of the influences of this five-hundred-year-long division on Mongolian culture was the diversity of costumes. The second is that the changes in the geographical environment, the changes in production and lifestyle, and the long-term contacts with many specific ethnic groups (such as the Tumut and Han, the Heshuo and the Tibetans, the Buryats and siberians) have almost completely disappeared the basic features of Mongolian clothing.
Embroidery craftsmanship
Mongolian embroidery or decorative patterns are composed of three techniques: dot, line and surface. Dot embroidery is a pattern composed of different densely arranged dots. This method of expression has a great effect on enriching patterns. Different effects are obtained by using a variety of different treatment methods such as the size, density, weight, and virtual reality of the points. There are many ways to point, including thick points, thin points, regular points, irregular points, dots, and other points of various shapes. The dots on the embroidered felt and boots are all dotted dots, which together form dotted lines and dotted faces, mainly setting off some embosses and main body patterns. These points are also sometimes the most revealing of numerous, aggregated phenomena. In addition, the dots also have a sense of activity, and on the dense dotted shading, they are decorated with several bright color cloth larger dots, with the association of lively spheres rolling and jumping. The dots also give a sense of image of twinkling stars and beaded reverie.
Thread embroidery is mainly the use of straight lines (vertical lines, horizontal lines, inclined lines); with different lengths, different thicknesses, and different dense lines, a variety of changes are made to form an excellent pattern. With different polylines, a variety of cross patterns are formed by means of thickness, overlap and inversion, and the common ones are echo patterns, hana-style cross patterns, and intestinal patterns. The most common are the intersection between the curly grass curve and the moiré, the connected curve, and the furrow and curly grass pattern, etc. You can also use lines to represent various levels of light and shade. The line has a sense of direction and dynamics, and is the best concept of curvy, straight, thick, thin, long and short. The horizontal line has a sense of stability, the vertical line has a sense of solemnity, the diagonal line has a sense of instability, the curve has a sense of elasticity, and the crossed line makes people have a complex or close unity and crisscrossing association.
The use of surfaces is wide-ranging, ranging from those composed entirely of block surfaces to those used in combination with other methods of expression. Compared with points, it has huge, holistic characteristics, and it is also the final transformation form of dense points and lines. Points and lines attach to faces when determining their position or pattern direction. In the application of faces, there are triangles, quadrilaterals, circles, etc., which can also evolve into a variety of shapes, such as polygons, oblique squares, rectangles, trapezoids, diamonds, curves and so on. This unique Mongolian embroidery technique is expressed in many of the costumes unearthed.
Architecture
The yurt is the most typical form of Mongolian architecture and the most ideal place for nomadic peoples to live. It consists of "Hana" (foldable wooden enclosure), "Uni" (rafters), "pottery brains" (skylights), doors and several pieces of wool felt. Convenient materials, simple production, easy to relocate. This architectural form is called "vault" or "felt tent" in ancient Chinese texts. It is an outstanding architectural form created by the northern nomadic peoples adapting to the nomadic way of life. The Huns used yurts around the 5th century BC. Later northern nomadic peoples such as Xianbei, Turkic and Khitan followed this form of residence. By the time of the Mongol Empire (13th century AD), with the rise of the Mongols, giant palace-style yurts that could accommodate a thousand people and car-mounted yurts pulled by dozens of cattle appeared. The yurt has been passed down to this day and has become a symbol of the nomadic peoples of the north.
Saddle craft
The Mongolian plateau is vast, and since the Huns or earlier, horses have been the main means of transportation for steppe nomads. For a long time, grassland herders have long developed the custom of loving horses and decorating horses. This custom led to a high degree of development in saddle craft. The Huns' saddles, judging from the bronze plaques unearthed, have only a saddle and no saddle. By the Liao Dynasty, the Khitans had developed the manufacturing process of saddles to a fairly high level. In 1953, two sets of saddles from the tomb of King Ma Wei in the ninth year of the Liao Ying calendar (959 AD) were unearthed in Dayingzi on the outskirts of Chifeng. One group is a bronze gilded golden dragon play beaded saddle ornament; the other group is a saddle ornament with more than 1,000 pieces such as horse horn head, coiled chest, tassel cover, back seat, saddle whip, horse pedal and so on. The harness is decorated with animal patterns and floral patterns, which are exquisitely crafted and richly decorated.
In 1986, two complete saddles were unearthed in the tomb of Princess Chen Guo of the Liao Dynasty in Qinglongshan, Qinglong mountain, Zhelimu League. The craftsmanship and decoration of these two sets of saddles is exquisite. In 1988, the Inner Mongolia Museum collected a relatively complete pair of pure gold saddle ornaments from the Mongolian yuan period in xilin gol league, which was excavated from a naturally destroyed tomb. According to research, the owner of the tomb is a young noblewoman. A galloping deer is carved in the center of the saddle-robed gold trim, surrounded by floral motifs. The liao horse tomb and the tomb of Princess Chen Guo also have deer motifs on the saddle, which should be regarded as a cultural inheritance. On the basis of inheriting the saddle craft of the ancient nomadic people, the Mongols have also produced saddle tools that are suitable for various purposes, various styles, and various texture decorations such as their own conquest, grazing, hunting, and travel.
Sculpture and plastic arts
Mongolian folk carvings are mostly wood carvings and bone carvings, followed by gold and silver. There are reliefs, see-through carvings, circular carvings; mostly used for living utensils (furniture, columns). Production tools (Mahan brush), entertainment equipment (horse-head piano, Mongolian chess). Most of the sculptures are based on animals, mostly using realistic techniques, vivid and realistic, and vividly expressing the looks and movements of various animals. It fully reflects the superb artistic observation and modeling ability of Mongolian folk artists. Six thousand years ago, the deer-patterned statues of the Zhao Baogou culture; the jade carvings of the Hongshan culture about 5,000 years ago; the jade carvings of the Red Mountain culture, such as malongs, jade birds, and jade turtles; the various animal patterns in the Yinshan rock paintings; the various animal patterns, bronze deer, and bronze sheep in the Ordos bronze ware; the extraordinary artistic talents displayed by the potters and pottery horses in the Xianbei tombs are formed by the long-term accumulation, precipitation, and evolution of the grassland hunting nomads who have been passed down for thousands of generations and continuously absorbed and integrated foreign cultures.
Paintings and folk motifs
Mongolian folk painting is dominated by Tibetan Buddhist murals, Tangga cloth paintings, and wooden paintings, and folk motifs occupy a very important position in various paintings and decorations. The cloud patterns, echo patterns, and gourd patterns often seen in Mongolian folk patterns have repeatedly appeared many times on the faience pottery of the Hongshan culture dating back 3 to 5,000 years, the painted pottery of the lower culture of Xiajiadian and the bronze of the upper culture of Xiajiadian and reached a high artistic level. The influence of the patterns on these excavated pottery and bronzes on the folk art patterns of the nomadic peoples in the northern steppe is obvious, and it is also the source of the Mongolian folk art patterns.
Author: Nigdul is the Museum of inner Mongolia Autonomous Region; Cai Tonghua is the Alxa League Museum
Originally published in Ordos Studies, No. 2, 2010
Source: Ordos Studies
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