Page 87 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

We see the ponderous officials in their voluminous robes, the
short, deep-chested horses of central Asian stock who trot with
high-stepping precision, while the air above them is filled with
swirling clouds and loud with the clamour of a fantastic assort-
ment of winged creatures come to do honour to the dead. In this
fabulous setting, the soul of the deceased can pass easily from the
world of men to the world of the spirits.
There can be little doubt that both the style and the subject matter PAINTING
of the tomb reliefs owe much to the great cycles of wall paintings
in halls and palaces, almost all trace of which has disappeared.
Only a few miles away from the Wu family tombs lay the Ling-
kuang Palace built by a brother of Han Wu Ti. The fame of its wall
paintings is celebrated in a poem by Wang Yen-shou, written a few
years before the Wu shrines were erected, which exactly describes
the subject matter of their reliefs:
Upon the great walls
Flickering in a dim semblance glint and hover
The Spirits of the Dead.
And here all Heaven and Earth is painted, all living things
After their tribes, and all wild marryings
Of sort with sort; strange spirits of the sea,
Gods of the hills. To all their thousand guises
Had the painter formed
His reds and blues, and all the wonders of life
Had he shaped truthfully and coloured after their kinds. 1
These paintings live only in the imagination, for the buildings
that housed them have long since crumbled to dust. But an in-
creasing number of painted tombs are coming to light which give
an impression of I Ian wall-painting at a rather humbler level.
Many depict with lively naturalism the daily life of a country es-
tate not unlike the self-contained villa estates of late Roman Brit-
ain; but the paintings are difficult to reproduce satisfactorily, and
published copies are deceptive. We find the same naturalism in
moulded brick reliefs from tombs at Kuang-han in Szechwan.
One depicts the salt mines, with pipelines of bamboo carrying the
brine over the hills to the evaporating pans, methods still in use in
Szechwan in the twentieth century. Another, divided horizon-
tally, shows in the lower half men harvesting and threshing in the
rice fields, while another brings their lunch; above, two hunters
kneel at a lake shore, shooting up at the rising ducks with arrows
trailing long cords. The border of the lake winds back, seeming
almost to lose itself in the mist, while behind the hunters stand
two bare trees. On the surface of the water arc fishes and lotus
flowers, and ducks swimming away as fast as they can go. This de-
lightful scene shows that in the later Han, craftsmen in Szechwan
were beginning to solve the problem of continuous recession in
depth. Another way to solve it was simply to omit the landscape
altogether. In the lively scene on the wall of a tomb in Liao-yang,
with horsemen and carriages coming to the funeral feast, there is
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