Page 357 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

affiliations and names of the individuals responsi- 1 Excavated in 1977 (cHMK2:i,2); published: Hebei 1979, 31,
ble for the objects and do not indicate their func- fig. 46; Tokyo 1981, no. i; Li Xueqin 1985,104, fig. 44; Li
Xueqin 1986, 2: no. 109; Hebei 1995,1:102-103, 2: pi. 86; So
tion or significance. 2 1995, 67, fig. 123.
An earlier description of these objects identified 2 Their official affiliation was Zuoshiku gong, "Workers [at-
them as the top parts of standards intended to repre- tached to] the Official Treasury of the Left"; their personal
names were Xi and Cai (Hebei 1995,1:436-437). These
sent the nomadic, tent-dwelling "barbarian" origins were probably not the bronzecasters but, rather, low-
3
of the Di. But the Di were in fact mountain dwellers ranking administrators.
3 So 1980, 319.
who had pursued a settled agricultural livelihood for
4 Prusek 1971; Di Cosmo 1999.
several millennia prior to the rise of the Zhongshan
4
kingdom. Although they probably lacked political
structures that rose to the level of a state until some-
time around the middle of the first millennium BCE,
the structure of their lineages paralleled that of the
Shang and Zhou, with whom they interacted and
intermarried over many generations. Indeed, the
tombs at Sanji conform with the ritual conventions
established throughout the Zhou culture.
Given the Di's high degree of assimilation into
the ways of their Zhou neighbors, these and similar
objects are more plausibly viewed as insignia of
Warring States rulers in general than as part of a
cultural heritage unique to their Di owners. That
they have so far been found only in Zhongshan is
probably attributable to the fact that all other
excavated tombs of comparable rank were looted
long before excavation.
The excavators believe that the three-pronged
shape was intended to evoke the character shan,
"mountain" (which forms part of the name Zhong-
shan), and they identify these objects as specific
symbols of that state, while acknowledging that
sfifln-shaped motifs appear elsewhere in art of the
Warring States period. The objects resemble
pronged bronze fittings on coffins in several aristo-
cratic tombs in northern China dating to the ninth
to fifth centuries BCE. Three-pronged motifs also
occur in Han and later iconography in connection
with the cult of immortality. The objects may have
had a specific relation to their funerary context,
perhaps serving to avert evil from the tomb — or to
conjure up the assistance of demonic powers; such
associations would accord with evolving notions
during the Warring States period about tombs and
the afterlife. LVF

356CHU AND OTHER CULTURES