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The T’ang Dynasty was an era of unrivalled
wealth and luxury. The country was successfully
reunified and the borders were expanded,
pushing Chinese influence into new lands.
Confucianism became a semi-religious
instrument of the state; yet Buddhism continued
to flourish, spreading into Korea and Japan. The
arts reached new levels of sophistication. Poetry
and literature flourished under the enlightened
rulers. The Silk Road brought fortunes into China.
Precious treasures were imported on the backs of
camels from far away lands and bartered for
Chinese silk, medicinal herbs, and pungent
spices. T’ang China was a multicultural empire
where foreign merchants from across Central
Asia and the Middle East settled in the urban
centers, foremost among them the thriving
capital of Chang’an (modern X’ian), a bustling
cosmopolitan center of over two million
inhabitants. Foreign traders lived next to native
artisans and both thrived. New ideas and exotic
artistic forms followed alongside. The T’ang
Dynasty was a cultural renaissance where many
of the forms and objects we now associate with
China were first created. Moreover, this period
represents one of the greatest cultural
outpourings in human history.
As new philosophical and religious strands
penetrated the thought system of early China,
the subject matter of tomb objects and tomb
patterns changed. The past practice of
entombing elite members of society with
earthenware objects continued throughout the
early and middle Tang period, but the earlier
emphasis placed on recreating daily life shifted to
flaunting status and excess. Tombs were no
longer "underground houses," but became a
landscape with murals depicting the palaces,
gardens, and open countryside in which the
nobles passed their lives. During the Tang
Dynasty, restrictions were placed on the number
of objects that could be included in tombs, an
amount determined by an individual's social
rank. In spite of the limitations, a striking variety
of tomb furnishings have been excavated. Entire
retinues of ceramic figures - animals,
entertainers, musicians, guardians - were buried
with the dead.
The inclusion of fantastic animal guardians as
part of the retinue of tomb figures began in the
Northern Wei dynasty (386-534) and continued
into the Tang dynasty. Also called earth spirits
(dusheng), or ‘zhenmushou’ ("tomb-guarding
beasts"), these guardians took the form of a
fantastic hybrid creature composed of various
animal and sometimes human elements and were
placed in the tomb in pairs to ward off any
malevolent beings who threatened to intrude.
Such idea was indeed already present during the
Warring States period (5th-4th centuries BC) in
tombs from the southern state of Chu, where
often ‘zhenmushou’ with incredible antler tines
and long tongues sticking out were placed at the
entrance of the tomb to guard the coffin and
protect it from evil. However, in the south, tomb
guardians quickly disappeared after the Eastern
Jin period (317-420), an abrupt change of
practice that probably reflected different cultural
approaches. This was probably due to the fact
that northern people -being more mindful of
spirits and demons- were always more inclined
to protect the dead from undesirable encounters
and went into a lot of effort in creating wonderful
sculptures of tomb guardians; southerners
instead simply chose to continue to transmit the
age-old practice of providing for the daily life of
the deceased in the afterlife.
- (TF.006)
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