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Chapter 16 In an essay published some years ago, I identified a portrait of
the Chinese monk Daoyan 道衍 (1335–1418) in the Palace
Faces of Transnational Museum, Beijing, as ‘part of a network of images that linked
the monasteries, the court and official culture’ in the Ming
Buddhism at the Early dynasty (1368–1644) and later (Pl. 16.1). Due to the
1
transnational character of East Asian monastic Buddhism,
Ming Court this portrait can also be recognised as belonging to an
international network of images. Its pictorial formula and
aspects of the biography of its subject connect it with Sino-
Japanese circuits of cultural exchange. Two almost
Marsha Haufler contemporary textile portraits of the Tibetan cleric Śākya
Yeshé (1354–1439?) were also part of an international web, but
it was one that extended westwards from the Ming court to
Tibet, where these works have been preserved (Pls 16.2–3).
2
Made in Ming imperial workshops for Tibetan viewers, these
images combine visual elements drawn from Chinese
imperial and Tibetan Buddhist sources. When viewed
together, the portrayals of Daoyan and Śākya Yeshé evoke
the complexity of the religious landscape of the early
15th-century Chinese court and its capital cities, Nanjing and
Beijing, and show how the Ming-dynasty ruling house used
different visual languages, much as it used multiple written
languages, to address people of different cultures.
Daoyan was born in Suzhou 蘇州 prefecture in the lower
Yangtze River region, the heartland of Han Chinese

Plate 16.1 Anonymous, Portrait of Daoyan (also known as Yao
Guangxiao), c. 1403–18. Hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk,
image: height 184.5cm, width 120.2cm; with mount: height 357cm,
width 166cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing

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