Here’s a print of Zhao Gongming (趙公明) on his tiger, holding a gold ingot and his magical sword breaker, which fires out explosive “sea-smoothing” pearls. In the sixteenth-century novel Creation of the Gods, Zhao is a general from Mount Emei in Sichuan province, who fights for the corrupt and crumbling Shang dynasty. After being killed by the Daoist Jiang Ziya, …
Bishop White’s Falcon
I’ve known this stone rubbing of a falcon forever. My Dad bought it in the 1950s from a gallery in Zürich “because I liked it”, the best reason to buy anything. The shop was near Dad’s business at Pelikanstrasse 6; he thinks it was Orell Füssli at number 10, though they are booksellers and printers, rather than art dealers. (There …
Taibai Shan Map, Mid-Autumn Festival 1700 太白全圖
Here’s a map of Tai Bai Shan (3750m), the highest mountain in central China’s Qinlin range, which rises about 100km southwest of Xi’an city. The name comes from the mountain’s summit, which shines white with snow for most of the year; “Tai Bai” is the Chinese for Venus, brightest planet in the sky. The map is a rubbing taken from …
The Guan Yu stone rubbing mystery
Here’s a rubbing taken from an engraved stone tablet – a stele – of Guan Yu, a third-century general later deified as the incarnation of martial righteousness (and here’s a video of how these stone rubbings are made). Guan is riding the legendary Red Hare, a horse which could gallop “1000 miles in a day”, and holds his trademark halberd, …
勅建雞足名山全圖: A Complete Picture of the Famous Holy Monument, Mount Jizu
Here’s a woodblock-printed map of Yunnan province’s Jizu Shan (雞足山) – Chickenfoot Mountain – which peaks at 3240m east of Erhai Lake and the old walled town of Dali. According to the artist Huang Xiangjian, who painted a colour landscape scroll of the mountain in 1656, Jizu Shan got its name because “it is formed with three ridges in front …
Rank Badge Beasts
This hand-coloured Chinese woodblock print from Yangliuqing, a famous craft centre outside of Tianjin city in northern China, came up recently at auction. The title, wenjing wuwei (文經武緯) literally means “civil warp, military woof” – the idea that civil and military departments should work closely together to govern the country. In reality, civil officials, who were only appointed after years …
Hallock’s Gods
It’s unusual to be able to date old Chinese woodblock prints – the same designs were often used for decades, and the cheap paper that they’re printed on ages badly (I’ve got a sun-bleached stove god print with a calendar for 1989, which looks at least a century older). However, I do know that the three prints below all date …
Miao Clay Whistles
There are very few rural temples in southeast Guizhou. Most people here are from the Miao ethnic minority, not Han Chinese; they have their own beliefs, and don’t build the usual Daoist-Buddhist-Confucian complexes you find elsewhere in China. However, all of Guizhou’s towns began life as Chinese military outposts or trading centres, not Miao settlements, and there are a few …
Yang Yuke 杨玉科
Yang Yuke (杨玉科; 1838–1885) was an ethnic Bai warlord from Yingpan village in Yunnan province. During the Muslim Uprising (1856–73) he raised a private army and fought on the Chinese side against the rebels, under the mentorship of general Cen Yuying. It was Yang’s forces that finally captured the Muslim capital, Dali, and executed their rebel leader Du Wenxiu in …
Fengdu
In 2010, I was with Narrelle on the south bank of the Yangtze river in Fengdu, one of the towns that was demolished and completely rebuilt higher ground to cope with rising water levels after construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The point of coming here was that over on the north bank is Ming Shan, a row of hills …