Central Academy of Fine Arts, School of Humanities Geng Shuo
The Art of Han Dynasty Tombs, by Xie Gelan, Augustus Gilbert de Wazan and Jean Laltigue, translated by Qin Zhen and Li Haiyan, published by Cultural Relics Publishing House in October 2020, 341 pages, 136.00 yuan
I knew two or three years ago that Qin Zhen was translating victor Segalen (1878-1919) and other French scholars who were studying the monuments of western China in 1914, and he would occasionally ask me on WeChat where a certain place written by the French was today. Probably in Qin Zhen's impression, I have run through many places, and perhaps happened to be involved. In fact, I only know a few things about this journey of the Xie Gelan expedition, which stemmed from reading Feng Chengjun's translation of "Archaeology of Western China" many years ago, as a pamphlet in the Zhonghua Bookstore's "World Sinology Series", which was published in one volume with Bo Xi and "Tocharian Examination" also translated by him. Feng translation era earlier, the words are simple and ancient, I did not leave too much impression, only remember this Frenchman with multiple identities such as writers, scholars, naval doctors, etc., lived in China for a long time, traveled a lot, wrote a lot, is very good at taking pictures, the camera likes to face the ancient tombs exposed in the wilderness. Over the years, when I study Han and Tang tombs, I sometimes look for old photos as a reference, and Xie Gelan's photographic works are often the first database that comes to mind.
Figure 1: The French edition of "Han Dynasty Tomb Art" published in 1935
At the beginning of the year, I received the "Art of Han Dynasty Tombs" just published by the Cultural Relics Publishing House, and I figured out the book co-translated by Qin Zhen and the Scholar Li Haiyan in France, the French name L'Art Funéraire, a L'époque des Han, which is a sequel to the two-volume catalogue printed in 1923 and 1924, that is, the special study conducted by the French expedition on the Guanzhong Qin and Han tombs and the Sichuan Han tombs they investigated, published in Paris in 1935 (Figure 1). Taken together, the three volumes are Xie Gelan's masterpiece In the field of cultural relics and archaeology, Mission Archéologique en Chine ("Chinese Archaeology"), while the earlier "Archaeology of Western China" is a brief translation of the 1914 expedition record. Accompanying Shegland were Augusto Gilbert de Voisins (1877-1939) and Jean Lartigue (1886-1940), one of the patrons of Shegoland's expedition, and the latter, after Shegland's death, devoted much of his energy to sorting, compiling and publishing the report on the Shegland expedition for the Museum of Gemmay. This book is one of the results of Laertigue's compilation and publication, and according to his account, Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) reviewed the manuscript of the whole book, made the necessary changes, and added several notes. Laertigue later became a senior admiral in the French Navy and was killed in German bombing in 1940.
Precious records
Based on the research of Scholars such as Xie Gelan's mentor Emmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (1865-1918), the focus of the 1914 Sichuan-Shaanxi expedition was selected as the remains of Qin and Han tombs, and the remains of medieval Buddhism were also noted in Sichuan. The introduction to this book clearly states that such an academic goal was formulated because "the influence of Han Dynasty art on the development of art in East Asia as a whole is not less than that on the political system and historical development, but the world has always known very little about Chinese art before the Han Dynasty, so it is impossible to judge whether the Han Dynasty period marked the peak or starting point of China's artistic development" (p. 3), so it is hoped that reliable physical materials can be obtained from fieldwork. Setting clear academic goals based on a certain dynasty and a certain type of relic was rare in early Chinese archaeological surveys in the early twentieth century.
Figure 2: The Mausoleum of Lishan Mountain, Qin Shi Huang, taken by the Xie Gelan delegation in 1914
Figure 3: The mausoleum of the Hancheng Emperor, taken by the Xie Gelan expedition in 1914
Turning over this treatise from a hundred years ago, with the help of black-and-white photographs, surveying and mapping drawings, sketches and detailed written records, the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (Figure 2) and the Western Han Tombs (Figure 3) on both sides of the Wei River, several Han Que, stone beasts and inscriptions preserved on the surface of Sichuan, and the cliff tombs excavated along the Min River and other rivers in the middle of the river, have come through time. I have basically run through these monuments, among which the Quxian Han Que was inspected together with Scholars such as Qin Zhen. Qin Zhen has done research on the best-preserved Shenfu Junque in Quxian County, and in the 2017 publication of "Picture Heaven and Earth: The Visual Program and Symbolic Structure of Shenfu Junque" ("Ancient Tomb Art Research" Series IV, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2017), it is noted that the Current Shenfu Junque is an important ancient site that has been protected, within a flat stone masonry wall (Figure 4), and the cemetery can also show the geomorphological characteristics of the cemetery as seen by the Xie Gelan expedition in that year——" The mountain gap where the Canal River flows down the river and turns back, and the numerous undulating hills hide the mountain form into layers of small protrusions, which can only be seen on the way down the river to Tuxi Town. (p. 37) The exquisitely complete stone que contrasts sharply with the overgrown wasteland. Although it cannot be said that the landscape described by the French is the original appearance of the Eastern Han Dynasty, it is undoubtedly closer to the historical scene than what my generation has seen (Figure 5). In recent years, the local government has built a protective shed for the Shenfu Junque, and while the cultural relics are better protected, the connection with the surrounding landscape has been dissolved to a certain extent (Figure 6).
Figure 5: ShenFu Junque Shuangque, taken by the Xie Gelan expedition in 1914
Figure 6: Shen Fu Junque in the protective shed, taken by Qin Zhen in 2021
From the "Han Dynasty Burial Art", we can also see another famous Han Que, the face of jun que in Pingyang Province a hundred years ago, standing in the field, the lower body is covered by the field soil, and there are sparse trees and raised hills not far away (Figure 7). Today, this suburb outside Mianzhou City and on the other side of the Fujiang River has long become a bustling urban area, and behind Shuangque, the modern Mianyang Science and Technology Museum has risen from the ground. Two thousand years ago, the descendants of the Yang family walked through the symbols guarding the entrance to another world to talk to their ancestors, and two thousand years later, the citizens of Mianyang walked through them to explore the mysteries of the world of science and technology (Figure 8).
Figure 7: Junshuangque, Binh Duong Province, photographed by the Xie Gelan delegation in 1914
Figure 8: Junque, Pingyang Province, located in front of the Mianyang Science and Technology Museum, photographed by Ma Boyao
Qin Zhen's doctoral dissertation studied stone beasts in Han Dynasty mausoleums, and Xie Gelan's work also brought enlightenment. Qin Zhen's article "New Discoveries of Hanjin Stone Beasts and Related Problems in Quxian County, Sichuan" (Sichuan Cultural Relics, No. 2, 2013) published in 2013 pointed out that Xie Gelan's expedition found a stone beast with a straight upper body and a squatting shape in Quxian County that year, and also photographed and sketched it (Figures 9 and 10). But for a long time after that, "this stone beast seemed to disappear between the lofty mountains and mountains of QuXian County, and it has not been recorded." In 2003, when a village-level road was built in Quxian County, workers found two stone beasts in the soil layer of the roadbed near the west Wumingque in Zhaojia Village, Tuxi Town, one of which was completely consistent with the above-mentioned Xie Gelan record, and when it was the same thing, this discovery prompted Qin Zhen to re-discuss the source and transmission route of early Chinese stone beast modeling (Figure 11). I think that realizing that the work of the Xie Gelan expedition retained a lot of historical information that may be lost due to the changes of the times, or that some important research clues were found in it, should be the main motivation for Qin Zhen to translate.
Figure 9: The scene of the discovery of the limbs of the stone beast in Zhaojiazhai in Quxian County, photographed by the Xie Gelan delegation in 1914
Figure 10: Sketch of the "Seated Tiger-shaped Stone Sculpture", drawn by Xie Gelan
Figure 11: Seated stone beast, quxian museum collection, taken by Qin Zhen in 2015
Emphasis is placed on the integrity of the remains
Ancient tombs have become an important excavation and research object after the establishment of modern archaeology, and "tomb art" has formed a special field in the study of Chinese art history in recent years, so for today's scholars, there is no problem of academic legitimacy in tomb research. When the Xie Gelan expedition embarked on a journey in 1914, it was seven years before the excavation of the Yangshao site, which was later considered china's first scientific archaeology, excavated in 1921 with the support of the Geological Survey by the Swede Anderson, and the modern form of the discipline of Chinese art history was still in the making. Xie Gelan's academic resources are nothing more than two: first, the content of tombs in the Chinese literary and historical tradition, although this aspect can be described as endless, but the information available is limited, and it has not developed into an independent research direction; second, the results accumulated by Western and Japanese scholars, especially the results of Sha Qi's investigation in various parts of China.
The Xie Gelan expedition did not have the frame of epigraphy, did not have the shackles of faith and taboos, and clearly regarded tombs as the most reliable way to understand the art of the Han Dynasty, which was a very predictable academic judgment. They realized that under the dual influence of the concept of thick burial and technical exchange, tomb art reached an unprecedented height during the Han Empire and occupied a very crucial position in the artistic activities of the Han Dynasty. But at the same time, it also reminds that, like any country, the top artists of the Han Dynasty will not gather in the field of tombs to work, and the surviving tomb art works cannot represent the first-class quality of the same era. The "limitation" of these two ends is still the background of today's research on Han Dynasty tomb art and even the entire ancient Chinese tomb art.
Due to the limitations of conditions and capabilities, the Xie Gelan expedition team did not carry out formal archaeological excavations, except for entering some cliff tombs along the Jialing River and minjiang rivers, as well as the Eastern Han Dynasty portrait brick tombs falsely rumored to be "Bao Sanniang's tomb" in northern Sichuan, their work basically focused on the investigation of surface remains. What impressed me was that the French, with their naval background, carried out meticulous surveying and mapping with advanced surveying tools, and the resulting surveys and written records were far from being comparable to the accounts of traditional Fang Zhi and Jinshi works in terms of comprehensiveness and accuracy of information (Figure 12).
Figure 12: Xie Gelan surveys and photographs Junque in Binh Duong Province
The expedition paid great attention to the integrity of the remains. During the investigation of the Sichuan Han Que, the expedition team actively sought out the location relationship between the tomb, Shinto and the tomb, or the spatial environment in which the tomb was located was included in the scope of investigation. In the study of the Qin and Han tombs in Guanzhong, the expedition team not only noticed the external form of the sealed soil, but also conducted a technical analysis of its construction process. For another example, according to the limited materials, Xie Gelan discussed the underground part of the Han tomb from the aspects of tomb passage, burial chamber, burial utensils, and burial items. The several types of material remains that the expedition team paid attention to are still the focus of academic research, and their research methods should be said to have been relatively advanced for a long time, and I believe that today's scholars have no reading barriers to this. In this sense, As an amateur archaeologist, Xie Gelan has made advanced contributions in the field of tomb research.
What is a "sculpture"?
"Han Dynasty Tomb Art" highlights the attention of Xie Gelan's expedition to the stone carvings of Han tombs, including ques, steles, and beasts. This is not only because the stone carvings are preserved on the surface of the earth and are relatively easy to visit, but more importantly, Xie Gelan uses the Knowledge System of Western Art History that he is familiar with as a background and reference to study Han Dynasty art, and sculpture is one of the three main research categories of Western art history. Xie Gelan noted that the negative result of the influence of epigraphy was that "the remnants of no written inscriptions are often ignored, even if their carving skills have reached a high level of artistic attainment". The expedition's work has left a very meticulous fieldwork record for many well-known and unknown stone carvings. It is precisely because of this that Xie Gelan regretted that after inspecting the Western Han Tombs in Guanzhong, Xie Gelan regretted: "Except for the particularly important exceptions to be mentioned in the next chapter, there are always no statues in various mausoleums and cemeteries, which objectively limits the value of Han Dynasty cemeteries at the level of art history." (p. 16)
How to view and deal with the relationship between tradition and Western studies is something that intellectuals must face in the era of great changes, and the influence of this era theme in the field of art creation is equally strong, and it also plays an obvious role in the emerging study of Chinese art history. Of course, China has long had three-dimensional plastic arts, but there is no Western concept of "sculpture" in its own cultural traditions, and even the word "sculpture" is a recombination of the words "sculpture" and "sculpture", which has been injected into the connotation of modern disciplines to correspond to the sculpture of Spanish, and the Japanese scholar Omura Xiya has played a key role in this academic creation process. Taking Western academic concepts and methods as the criterion, the three-dimensional artworks in Chinese history are grouped under the concept of "sculpture", thus determining the internal rationale of various versions of "Chinese sculpture history" that can still be seen now.
However, while opening up new areas of research, the Westernized "History of Chinese Sculpture" with external styling as the selection criterion also creates the risk of reducing three-dimensional works with different cultural connotations to the same category, such as Buddha statues for believers to see and tomb figurines buried deep in the ground are placed in the same context for formal analysis. In other words, a large number of "sculptures" in ancient China were not originally made in the name of art, and some of them were even not displayable and ornamental in the first place. If the nature of the work cannot be clarified, misunderstandings will inevitably occur.
Figure 13: The stone carving "Ma Ta Xiongnu" in front of Huo's tomb was taken by the Xie Gelan expedition in 1914
When studying the most famous stone sculpture "Ma Ta Xiongnu" (Figure 13), Xie Gelan had a basic judgment: "From the perspective of carving technology, the early Chinese did not master the technique of hollowing out the stone, and large stone carvings also needed to consolidate the sense of balance of the work through the strict symmetry of the overall form." (p. 24) However, a growing body of archaeological evidence suggests that long before the Han Dynasty, hollow carving was not difficult for Chinese craftsmen. In recent years, He Xilin has analyzed the knowledge generation process of the so-called "Huo Go Disease Tomb", believing that the entire mound is constructing an imaginary fairy world to express the concept of immortality and immortality, and from this point of view, he can understand the meaning of the stone sculptures covering the mound ("Rethinking the Tomb of Huo Go Sick"" and "Art Research", No. 3, 2009). Zheng Yan further pointed out that not chiseling between the legs of the horse is not "can't", but "not for", stone carving and the earth are connected as one, which is the active choice made by the craftsmen after fully considering the function and significance of these carvings, and the style of the work therefore needs to be explained by more specific history ("Behind the Style - A New Exploration of Stone Carving in the Tomb of Huo To the Sick Tomb of the Western Han Dynasty", Shaanxi History Museum, No. 18, Sanqin Publishing House, 2011).
The Art of Han Dynasty Tombs is a precious stone of his mountain, and while providing scholars today with precious materials and enlightening ideas, it also raises a hitherto outdated question: how to generate problems from China's own cultural and artistic traditions and find research methods.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Yijia Xu