Page 398 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

fierce creatures." In western regions, such figures
usually took the form of lions; in the Far East
(where lions were unknown), the creatures were
generally rendered as tigers or bears. On the other
hand, bears may have been considered important
spiritual forces in Siberia, where they were probably
more prevalent than they were in China; it may be
that, in seeking out practices from lands adjacent
to them, the Han learned of the powers of the bear.
Certainly the spiritual force of the bear was de-
ployed in exorcism rites. The Zhou li (Rites of Zhou)
contains a famous passage describing an exorcist:
"In his official function, he wears [over his head] a
bearskin having four eyes of gold, and is clad in a
black upper garment and a red lower garment.
Grasping his lance and brandishing his shield, he
leads the many officials to perform the seasonal
exorcism (no), searching through houses and
driving out pestilences." 3
Bears also appear in a number of texts that
describe landscapes, particularly in fu poetry, and
in descriptions of animal combats organized by
emperors and princes to demonstrate their har-
mony with and control of the natural world. Such
natural combats were often linked to the feats
of the Yellow Emperor, one of the most venerated
Late Zhou and Early Han deities. 4
Bear-shaped attachments were prevalent for
only a relatively short period, being most widely
used in the Western Han period and then gradually
diminishing and disappearing. References to bears
do not appear regularly in Han texts and indeed
seem to diminish in frequency through the course
of the period. JR

1 Excavated in 1968 (M 1:4102); reported: Zhongguo i98ob,
i:49-53-
2 See finds from Shiqiao at Xuzhou, Jiangsu province
(Xuzhou 1984, 22-40, figs. 54, 56).
3 Quoted after Bodde 1975, 78.
4 Lewis 1990,195-212.

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