In popular lore Shangqing Palace (上清宫), a formerly important Daoist temple at Longhu Shan (Dragon-Tiger Mountain) in Jiangxi province, is probably best-known for the opening chapters of Shi Nai’an’s fourteenth-century novel Outlaws of the Marsh – aka The Water Margin – a heroic account of renegades defying the corrupt Song court. According to the novel, 108 malignant spirits are imprisoned …
Immortality and Rockets: the Legend of Chang E
China’s Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. The roundness of the full moon that night represents “wholeness”, the getting together of communities and families to gather in the harvest or to simply enjoy each other’s company by eating mooncakes. These two prints, both collected around 1930 by the Reverend Hallock, tell the story …
Qixi: Double Seventh Festival
The letter accompanying this print was written at Shanghai by the Reverend Hallock on 8 August 1929, and this picture was made for Qixi, the Double Seventh Festival (held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month – 11 August in 1929). Like Valentine’s day in the West, the festival celebrates romance. The story goes that a cowherd fell …
Two Guanyins
Another print from early 1930s Shanghai courtesy of Reverend Hallock, this time of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Guanyin. She’s shown in two simultaneous incarnations: the Bringer of Children, and riding the Aoyu, that fish-like sea monster at the bottom of the print. Although the Aoyu aspect represents Guanyin subduing evil in general terms, at Shanghai and coastal eastern China this …
Pan Gu: Humans from Parasites
A while back I posted about the Reverend Henry Galloway Comingo Hallock, who in the late 1920s sent stacks of woodblock prints of Chinese gods, bought in Shanghai, back to the US, along with letters describing the deities and seeking funds for his various Church-led causes. I’ve picked these prints up here and there but recently received a cache of …
Applying Clan Law to Demons: Zhou Han and Griffith John
Here’s a Chinese print apparently illustrating a typical nineteenth-century court scene. Flanked by two rows of officials, a magistrate and his staff sit behind a desk judging criminal cases, while out in front the court police dole out beatings and other punishments to encourage suspects to confess. A bit savage perhaps, but part of daily life at the time. Except …
A Blue Ground Print from Yangliuqing
Here’s a “Blue Ground” or qingdi print (青地年画) from Yangliuqing showing the master strategist Kongming, aka Zhuge Liang, from the historical novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. A roundel above contains a generalised lanscape with figures, with a pair of crickets (feeding on some fruit) below. I especially like the crickets. As with most Yangliuqing prints, the outlines have been …
A warrior’s phoenixes
Here’s a stone rubbing of a pair of phoenixes amongst peonies, overshadowed by a wutong tree. Peonies are considered the “king of flowers” in China, often paired in art with the phoenix, which usually represents female power. But here, as both male and female phoenix are shown, the peonies simply emphasise the regal nature of the birds. The tree links …
He He Harmony
Here’s a rubbing from a tablet at the Hanshan Temple in Suzhou of Hanshan (寒山) and Shide (拾得), two Tang-dynasty free thinkers later deified as He He Erxian (和合二仙), the twin Immortals of Harmony. Nothing definite is known about Hanshan and Shide, not even their dates or real names. They lived sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries; Hanshan – …
Tribute Elephants at the Qing Court
Elephants are associated with wisdom in Chinese lore – the bodhisattva Puxian, the very embodiment of wisdom, is depicted riding one – and the emperors themselves used them as a symbol of their own sagacity and authority. Life-sized carvings of elephants guarded the Imperial tombs, and the palace kept live ones too, in stables known as the “Tame Elephant Facility” …