Unknown
Chinese, western central Sichuan province

Female Dancer and Male Musician Playing Qin Zither, 25-220 CE, Eastern Han dynasty
earthenware
22 1/4 x 12 3/4 x 7 and 15 1/4 x 12 3/4 x 5 3/4 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Dr. Sidney Edelson to honor the memory of Erny Margaret Edelson
1995.36 and .62

RESEARCH PAPER

The SBMA Female Dancer and Musician Playing the Qin zither are earthenware tomb figures or “ming-qi” from the Sichouan province in Southwest China. They date back to the Eastern dynasty (200 BCE – 220CE) Funerals and after life in the Han and subsequent Chinese cultures.

For the people of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE and subsequent Chinese cultures, the “afterlife” was believed to be a continuation of life on earth.

As Wong Chong (27-97 CE) wrote: “Death is but another form of life. We weep for those whose funerals are solitary. The desolate souls are without companions. The tombs are tightly shut and here are no cupboards for the cereals and grains. That is why figurines are made to wait on the dead and food is stored in great quantity to appease their souls”.

Consequently, good company was needed, hence the abundant presence of figurines representing dancers and musicians.

Prior to this and the previous Qin dynasty, participants in the funeral processions including the real musicians and dancers would have been buried alive with the deceased. Emperors’ wives, mistresses, and servants were also buried alive to share his afterlife as they had shared his life on earth. But in accordance with Confucius’ criticism of this practice, the Hans, like the great emperor Qin Shi Huang-di before them, chose a more humane solution.

Consequently, clay replica figurines or “ming-qi” were made to substitute for their living counterparts.

The word “Ming qi” translates to a word similar to “specter” or spirit of the dead, and consequently although these figures are charming to the eye today, to the Han people seeing them would be like seeing a kind of ghostly presence.

As shown in tomb paintings and sculpted wall tiles from these times, in addition to figurines of the most important persons of their lives, “ming qi” of family pets, chariots, replicas of favorite treasures as well as objects that are necessary for daily life like livestock, wells, graneries and even copies of their homes were included. (Examples of some of these types of objects can be seen in other SBMA “ming qi” from the Han period.)

The Hans delighted in including full replicas of scenes from everyday life often adding groupings of ordinary people performing the activities of their trades. Their interest in portraying everyday reality dates back to previous dynasties when Confucius philosophy began to define “Man at the center of the universe”. It might be noted that this change in concept parallels that change in Western art as we see the Greek gods taken on more human like forms. Like the Greek and Roman statues of the same period tomb figurines were painted for added realism. Although the SBMA figurines do not seem to have any coloring other than that of the clay, we can assume that they were originally painted: the best preserved tomb objects of the same period are all painted. Unfortunately, due to erosion and humidity the SBMA figurines must have lost their colors.

The Han dynasty had started with an economic depression, serious enough to force the radical reduction in size of these “funerary figurines” from the previous life size figures of Qin’s Terra Cotta Warriors. But by mid to late Han Dynasty, prosperity had returned and had to be shared with the dead: it was believed that if the ancestors were dissatisfied and hungry, they would cause trouble for their living descendants. Funerals became so elaborate and lavish that by the Tang dynasty laws had to be passed to contain them so as not to bring financial ruin to families.

The choice of clay to facilitate mass-production

Even by the late Han Dynasty, so many clay figurines were required that they had to be mass-produced just to satisfy the ever-increasing demand.

Amazingly it had been during the previous reign of Qin Shi Huang-di that the modular mass production and the efficiency of an assembly line production had been invented. His great Terra Cotta warriors were mass-produced in modules: arms, bodies in different positions, heads with different expressions, etc and then were assembled in various combinations to produce a variety of figures. When a variety of different composites of these figures were put together in groupings in the tomb it made them look animated-as if they were moving and alive. (Note: it is easy to see that the head of The Female Dancer was pegged into a tubular neck).

Clay was the natural material to produce them. Clay (derived from loess—“yellow earth”) was very abundant in China and was easy to work than bronze or stone. The two SBMA figurines are different colors: The Musician paling the Qin zither is reddish in tone because it is made of a clay very rich in iron (probably formed from the decomposition of basalt) whereas the dancer is made of a purer and paler clay. Both were made in ceramic molds and baked at low temperature (900ºC- 1050ºC) [hence the name of terra cotta]. . If you look at the shoulders of The Musician… you will see the joint line where the two valves of the mold met. This line would not have been visible originally, but has been revealed with decay and erosion over time.

The other advantage of using clay was that individual facial traits could be modified manually before being fired. This explains why despite the systematization and modularization of their fabrication, these figurines have different faces.

We can assume that these pieces were originally painted since other better-preserved tomb objects of that period are painted or bear traces of coloring.

The SBMA Female Dancer and the Qin-zither Player

Dance and music had been important to the Chinese for centuries long before the Han times. The disciples of Confucius (500 BCE) were required to dance and practice to be accomplished musicians because “music and dance create a harmony which reaches beyond human interaction”.

The SBMA Female Dancer

She looks as if her movement is frozen in time. We can see her raised knee, turned inwards under her skirt, revealing her under-skirt. She is holding her skirt in order to facilitate her turn and move into the next step. Coming out of the festooned flowing silk of her sleeve, her other hand holds a scarf. “Long sleeves are an aid to dance as wealth is an aid to trade” (Han Feizi, 3rd c. BCE).

The shape of her body and her dress has been created by just a few simple lines in the mold, and her head is surmounted by a fairly elaborate hairdo and cocked to one side, adding to the general movement of the dance and contributing to her winning smile. Her face has very little detail: her eyes are barely incised, but her smile and her mouth are well delineated: indeed, when a dancer performs, her eyes are barely visible and of no great importance, whereas her smile, sometimes revealing her teeth, is noticeable from afar.

Though made in such a simple way, she communicates to us, spectators, the joy she feels in the performance of her art.

Of course, dance needs music to unite the dancers by a common rhythm. But drums were the most common instrument, not the Qin-zither used by the SBMA musician. The music of the Qin (the ancestor of the zither and the guitar) was considered most refined and often reserved to a small group of Confucian gentlemen.

The SBMA Musician playing the Qin-zither

This musician was not found in the same tomb as the dancer, but he too seems to derive great pleasure from his art. He sits very straight, with his instrument (very eroded) lying flat in front of him. The qin has no frets but the levers that tighten the seven strings across the face of the instrument allow the sound to be carried out.

It would be strummed with one hand while the other hand pressed the strings against the board.

Our musician is looking straight in front of him because a good Qin player would not look at his hands and of course, nobody would ever put a bad musician in a tomb.

In real life this musician would be playing for himself or for a small group of friends. The qin was an instrument for the educated. It is often seen in the hands of sage figures in Chinese landscape paintings, emphasizing the tranquility that practicing the instrument could bring to the player. It created the feeling of harmony between the self and the outside world and could induce a meditative state, which may also explain the radiant smile on our musician’s face.

Isn’t it amazing how much power those two little clay figurines were given, how much pleasure they can impart to us, modern observers, and how much of their contemporary culture they can reveal?

Note on music during the Han Dynasty

Music was already given much importance during the Qin dynasty, which created a music administrative agency, the Yucfu (= the music bureau) that was kept by the Hans.

- It organized the court rituals

- It collected folk music from outside the court

- It trained musicians

- It developed entertainment repertories for the aristocrats

- It encouraged new music forms.

Musician slaves often came from outside China and introduced their musical traditions. Nomadic instruments were also integrated.

It is interesting to see that, despite their individuality in their art, dancers and musicians were highly controlled by a centralized set of rules.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The British Museum Book of Chinese Art edited by Jessica Rawson, published by Thames and Hudson

Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass production in Chinese Art published by Princeton University Press.

Margaret Medley, The Chinese Potter, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998 published by Phaidon press ltd. London 1999.

Lee. S. A History of Far Eastern Art. 5THed. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New-York, 1994

Tyler Charlotte S. Paper prepared for the SBMA Docent Council, August 30, 1997

Treasures--- 300 best Excavated Antiques from China, edited by China cultural

Relics Promotion Center. New World [Press. Cypress book (US) Company, Inc.

1992. (Chapter on pottery, pp.62 -124)

The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music, edited by Geoffrey Hindley, Hamlin publishing group lad. 1974

Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council by Jacqueline Simons, Spring 2006