On the Differences between Han Rhapsodies and Han Paintings in Their Portrayal of the Queen Mother of the West and Their Religious Significance

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The author compares the depiction of the Queen Mother of the West in Han Rhapsodies, which can be considered the predominant literary form in the Han dynasty, and in Han tombs with paintings or carvings on stones and bricks. Comparing literary and visual representations to gain a deeper understanding of a particular aspect is very relevant and promises high expectations, but the author's arguments are not strong enough. The author has done important research in primary sources in terms of statistical data, but there is a lack of thorough analysis and interpretation of the data. The statistical data show that there are very few descriptions of the Queen Mother of the West in the Han Rhapsodies. It would be interesting to look for the main reasons for this, and especially to investigate how the scholarly view of the Queen Mother of the West influenced the craftsmen and other social classes. The main argument that the comparison shows two different functions of the Queen Mother of the West is not convincingly presented. The fact that the Queen Mother of the West appears in funerary art among many other earthly scenes does not prove that she "presides over both the real world and the world of longevity and immortality," as the author claims on p. 16. Moreover, much of the paper consists of direct quotations, most of them from secondary sources. These should be the main material from which various ideas are drawn, and should be summarized by the author to support his/her arguments.

Some further comments:

1) The author uses the word painting for all Han images, including carvings on stones and bricks. He/she should define the meaning of this word more clearly or use Han images to include paintings on the wall and carvings on the stones and bricks.

2) The theoretical and methodological background should be expressed more clearly: Why did the author choose to compare only the Han Rhapsodies and not other literary works or descriptions? Were other textual sources not relevant to the images of the Queen Mother of the West? Such explanations should be more clearly stated.

3) The author mentions 195 archaeological accounts of the Queen Mother of the West, but does not specify the source. It is said that there are 66 images of the Queen Mother of the West in the archaeological reports, of which 58 are on stone reliefs. Later, the paper speaks of 52 images on stone reliefs. The numbers are confusing, moreover the author does not give any information about the other images. Are they painted on the walls or carved into the bricks or stones? The overall picture of all the depictions in Han art is not clear.

4) The funerary context should be discussed more clearly. The excavations of Han tombs reveal celestial scenes on the ceilings and upper parts of the walls, while the walls were covered with large pictures of earthly scenes or scenes from the life of a deceased person.

5) All the images of the Queen Mother of the West were found in the context of tombs - the creators of these images were not considered artists, but merely craftsmen. The author does note the distinction between scholars and "commoners" but still refers to them as artists and painters. This should have been taken into account.

6) The author assumes that the occupants of the tombs depicting the Queen Mother of the West did not belong to the high social class. The distinction between the different social classes needs to be made clearer. Do higher officials and generals not belong to the upper social class?

7) The regional distribution of Han stone carvings is not clear. What are BI and BII or A I and AII types? They should be more clearly described and included in the analysis.

8) What does the civil class mean?

9) The literature selected is mostly Chinese, some other sources should also be included, including Michael Loewe's works on Han immortality and Lillian Tseng's book Picturing Heaven in Early China.

Author Response

Thanks. We have revised the paper. The response is attached in the following file.please check it.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Reader's Report, "On the Differences between Han rhapsodies and Han paintings..."

This reader finds real problems with this essay.  Even in the abstract there are serious methodological problems: 

1. We have no assurances that what we have today is representative of what once existed. We know, as Martin Kern has pointed out, that we have but a tiny fraction of the fu that once existed (he has spoken of 1/100), and the same must be true of the paintings and stone reliefs.  Archaeologists routinely speak of "preservation bias."    Therefore statistical "proofs" are meaningless.
2. The author doesn't seem to realize that artisans who specialized in paintings probably didn't specialize in carving. Therefore merging these two categories is not helpful.
3. There is significant new evidence that the author of this piece has overlooked, a mirror stand from the Haihun hou tomb (sealed 59 BCE).

The paper is repetitious in many places and fails to build a convincing case for any hypothesis. For example, when we see the four authors whose fu ("great fu) have survived, then we can guess that many more fu would have been written in imitation of these four.  We have few, if any, "small fu," but given the importance of the immortality theme in the histories and masterworks of the period, it is hard to believe that only these four authors would have mentioned Xi Wangmu in passing.  The author's surmises are based on old ideas about the class preferences of certain groups.  But the last thirty or forty years of scholarship has demonstrated, over and over again, that those old ideas are wrong.  Emperors, nobles, high and low officials – all these were interested in immortality (either as a fanciful subject or as a serious pursuit).  There were no "intellectuals" in Han, as all the people we know of longed to be holding government positions, and the term "intellectuals" should be reserved for people determined to be independent from the government.  (The author would be well advised to look up the literature on the genesis of the term.)  Nor are the officials he or she discusses "aristocrats."  If the author is going to engage in a class analysis, well it's been done already, and done well, by Jiang Yingju (a Shandong archaeologist), who showed that there was a hierarchy of decorations for tombs, with nobles having silk paintings, and paintings in general ranking above stone carvings, which could be mass-produced (not for the masses, but for a larger market).

Someone who promises a "class analysis" should be far more sophisticated than the author is.  For one thing, I suspect the author has never considered that officials are not aristocrats, unless they are Chancellors (from Wudi on).  For another, the author does not seem to realize that Han society is status-based, not class-based, by which this reviewer means that wealth (the basis of "class," i.e., "economic class") was but a small contributing factor to a person's authority and social standing.

There are many missed opportunities and misconstruals here.  The author doesn't discuss frontality and what it apparently means to viewers.  "Central deity" and "supreme deity": for whom and when?  Xi Wangmu, so far as this reviewer knows, never became Shangdi or Taiyi or any god that high in the Han pantheon.  That the order of gods worshipped in the pantheon seems to change over time during the two Han dynasties eludes the author.  If the author is an art historian, one doesn't expect path-breaking work in Han history to underlie the arguments presented, but one doesn't expect that if the author is treating her subject as the chief or supreme deity, that the author understands the basic theology underlying such terms.  Here the work of Tian Tian (Peking University) and Marianne Bujard (in Paris, writing in English) would help to bring greater clarity.  No mention is made of Kenneth Brashier's work, of Miranda Brown's, or of other works in art history in EuroAmerican languages. 

The essay is misconceived, for when you can say almost nothing about Han artisans, aside from providing a list of names, this is not noteworthy.  Putting things in tables helps the reader, but only when the tables include information that profits from being seen in tables (makes significantly more sense when presented in tabular form).

I suspect the piece was not written by a native speaker of English, because so many words are "off."  There were no lobbyists in Han times, to take one egregious example; "intellectuals" has already been mentioned as a problem.    "Tread stones" is not English, nor is "portrait stone tombs."  Pictorial stones are not always portrait stones.  Longevity is not a "function" (contra p. 9).  I have no idea what "mutual evidence" could mean, on p. 14.  "Mutually supporting evidence"??  An incident (a one-time event) is not the same thing as a religious movement (p. 14). There are also mistranslations, quite a few, beginning with the fact that lingzhi (mentioned p. 10) is not a mushroom, but a fungus. (The Wang Mang edict is badly translated, for example,

...遂獲西王母 之應，神靈之徵，以祐我帝室，以安我大宗，以紹我後嗣，以繼我漢功。厥害適統不宗元緒者，辟不違親，辜不避戚。夫豈不愛？亦惟帝室...

The significance of that "wo" 我 needs to be rethought. I see no "world" here whatsoever, contra the author's translation, nor any Chinese graph that would correspond to "domination."  Plainly, the author does not understand the wording well enough.

And "palm leaves" (earlier) should probably be "rushes."  And there is general sloppiness, as when the author writes of Empress Xiaoyuan and Emperors Han Yuan and Han Cheng.  There are conventions for these things, and it doesn't take much to discover them and then follow them, unless there exist good reasons not to do so.

When I try to think how the author could reframe the arguments, I am somewhat at a loss.  One expects a piece of scholarship to do one of two things: (1) to present a new hypothesis; (2) to marshal evidence found in multiple sources so that it has more impact on readers.  The author clearly fails at (1); perhaps he or she could try harder to achieve (2).

Author Response

please  see the following attachment which includes the reponse.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I am very honored to have reviewed such an important research article. This paper aims to examine the differences between Han Rhapsodies and Han paintings in their portrayal of xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West (known as the Queen Mother for short), one of the most popular and influential female deities in China, and their religious meanings, from an interdisciplinary perspective. The authors fully analyze the four Han fu works, and 66 paintings, which depicted the Queen Mother of the West, and argue that there were two “Queen Mothers of the West” in the Han dynasty: one was worshipped by the ruling class, and the other was popular among the ordinary people. This article contributes to our understandings of the depictions of the Queen Mother in the Han dynasty, and its strengths are in its data collections and comparison. However, the main argument contradicts my understandings of popular deities. I strongly recommend the following significant article to the authors, and will explain my positions in detail:

Duara, Prasenjit. 1988. “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War”. The Journal of Asian Studies 47 (4): 778-795.

As a scholar of folk beliefs and popular religion, I agree with Prasenjit Duara that one religious symbol (such as xiwangmu or guandi) had different meanings for different audiences in different places at different times, and the stories, meanings, and images of the religious symbols have been changing in a long historical process. Despite the differences, the symbol and myths surrounding it are also continuous at the same time. In a word, the complexity of any religious symbol and popular deity lies in the fact that its images and myths are simultaneously continuous and discontinuous. The data represented in this article is amazing, but the main hypothesis has been positioned from an essentialist perspective. It will be great if the authors could include the updated scholarship in popular religion in this important research, and revise their essentialist point of view toward folk beliefs.

My second concerns are with the analysis of the class about the writers, artists, and patrons. It seems that the authors use our modern ideas of “class” to interpret the data in the Han dynasty, and differentiate between the ruling class, the middle class, and the lower class, etc. I am personally very conscious of the limitations of these terms, and wonder if the authors could add one paragraph to explain their term of “class”, and the limitations of using this term. Furthermore, Are there any descriptions of the different groups in the Han literature and records? For instance, how did the Wu family (of Wu Liang Shrine) represent themselves? As literati or as scholars? I would also recommend that the authors try to avoid the usage of “the middle class” in general, as some scholars have argued that “the middle class” has never existed in China. The authors point out that “the construction of portrait stone tombs was relatively expensive, so the owners of the tombs may have been wealthy commoners” (p. 8). I agree with this and recommend that the authors analyze the class with more clear consciousness. If only wealthy people could build their tombs, it is not convincing to argue that Wu Liang Shrine and the tombs of Wu Liang could be designated as “low-level tombs.”

I personally like all the content analysis about the images of the Queen Mother in Han literature and arts, which is very important and insightful. Sometimes I hope that the authors could provide more contexts for the content analysis. For instance, on page. 14, the authors cite the Queen Mother incident in “Wuxing zhi”. I recommend that the authors elaborate on this analysis by providing more contexts about the famine, the politics, and ordinary people’s reactions.  

Finally, I have also some trivial suggestions, and would like to list them as follows:

1. On p. 2, “Sima Xiangru, Yang Xiong, and Zhang Heng were all famous dafu masters, and the four works by them mentioned above all belong to the dafu type.” The authors only list three authors here, but before this paragraph, four authors are listed. Probably, “the three works by them” is correct?
2. The authors use “the civilian class” several times, probably there are other good terms to use instead.
3. In Table A1, the numbers are not continuous. Are there any explanations on this format?

Author Response

Thanks so much.We have revised the paper and provided a point-by point reponse to the reviewer's comments. Please  see the attachment file. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf