The Xiongnu did not acquire objects only from their Chinese neighbors. Textiles from burials in Noin-Ula, another Xiongnu-period site in southern Mongolia, included Chinese and locally made felts but also other textiles that were almost certainly made in Central or West Asia.69 A Greek silver medallion was also discovered in Noin-Ula, recycled as a platera, and a Roman glass bowl in Gol Mod 2, also in the Xiongnu area in what is now Mongolia.70 These are generally dated later than the Ordos tombs, from the late first century BC to the first century AD. They are different from the pit burials at Xigoupan and other Ordos sites in that they consist of a deeply buried wooden burial chamber accessed by a ramp. They include peripheral burial pits that belong to people who followed the elite occupant of the main chamber into death.71
The earrings are part of this story: they might also have been made in Chinese or steppe workshops. Alternatively, the jade plaques could have been fashioned by Chinese artisans well accustomed to working with this material—either in China or on the steppe—and then sold or given as gifts to the Xiongnu, whose craftsmen then incorporated them into this elaborate headdress. Jade and dragons are both often associated with the cultures of central China, but, as with most subjects in this book, the story is not a simple one.
JADE AND DRAGONS
Several different minerals are often termed yu (玉), the Chinese word for jade, the most valued in early China being nephrite found locally in the Yangzi River delta in eastern China.72 But some pieces identified as “jade” are not nephrite but serpentine and marble.73 The stone was worked from Neolithic times into copies of weapons and tools but also into forms that clearly had a ritual meaning and are found in a mortuary context. These included the bi, a flat disc with a circular hole in the center.74 Few of the jades found in burials had any wear, supporting this ritual use. However, since little jade survives outside burials, we cannot be certain how much was produced for other contexts and has long been lost.75
Jade is a hard stone and has to be worked by abrading with sand.76 The fine work of these early jades attests to high levels of skill and investment of time: these were expensive and valued objects. There is still considerable uncertainty about the sources of jade used in China, but for nephrite they certainly might have included Lake Baikal in Siberia and Khotan in the Tarim basin in eastern Central Asia (see below and chapter 6). It is possible, therefore, that some jade was imported two thousand miles from Khotan.77 This, and the skill and time required to work it, probably made it as valuable to the early kings in China as lapis was to the Egyptian pharaohs. Jade ranges in color from white to black, with the lightest jade having translucent qualities. The aesthetic appreciation of different colored jades is reflected by the vocabulary developed to describe them: mutton fat, chicken bone, orange peel, nightingale, egg, ivory, duck bone, antelope, fish belly, shrimp, chrysanthemum, rose madder, and many more.78
Nephrite jades also include a dark green stone found in Mongolia and eastern Siberia near Lake Baikal. Bunker discusses an openwork plaque, probably carved using stone from eastern Siberia, and argues that this piece was probably created on the steppe.79 The most likely method of creating jade ornaments, because of the stone’s hardness, was abrasion with quartz sand, crushed sandstone, or crushed loess, the main part of which is quartz.80 Metal tools started to be used before the time our piece was made. The design of the dark-green plaque is almost identical to that on bronze belt plaques discovered in Ivolga (near Ulan-Ude) and eastern Siberia. It also resembles gold plaques, inlaid rather than openwork, excavated from a tomb in Sidorovka, near Omsk in western Siberia. This last site is dated to the late third to second century BC, whereas the bronze and nephrite objects are slightly later. Communities of Chinese craftsmen were known to have worked at Ivolga, so it is also possible that this dark-green plaque was made by them.81
One of the sinuous animals on the nephrite, bronze, and gold belt plaques is of a type now often associated with the Xiongnu, described as a dragon with a horned lupine head and proposed as an antecedent to the elongated dragon found in Han-period China.82 The dragon is seen in the arts of Central Asia from the late third/early second millennium, but it is, as Sara Kuehn points out in her study of the dragon in eastern Christian and Islamic contexts, “one of the most ancient iconographies of mankind.”83 She argues that, as well as being used in Xiongnu-period art, it is a motif of the Yuezhi who founded the Kushan Empire (see chapter 3). The dragon in profile on the earrings (figure 2) shows some features of the lupine style, with its long nose and horn. In the jade, the carving, and the depiction of the dragon the piece is also similar to a piece found in the Xiongnu graves of Noin-Ula, considerably further north on the Selenga River in present-day Mongolia.84 The identity of the animal on the second plaque—shown face on—is less clearly a dragon: the small ears are more tiger-like (figure 2). Dragons and tigers are often found together, as in the Ivolga belt plaque, mentioned above, but sometimes an animal with a long sinuous body and such a head is described as a dragon with a tiger head or, in Bunker’s terminology, a “feline dragon.”85 The tiger shown on the belt plaque from tomb 2 at Xigoupan (figure 3) shows something of this sinuousness, with its body twisted around in almost a full circle.
Little scientific testing on the jades has been carried out, and most identifications of its source are based on the style. But this is always open to revision. Some scholars, for example, have long concurred that many of the 755 “ jade” carvings in the twelfth-century BC tomb of Fu Hao on the Yellow River near Anyang are made from nephrite from Khotan.86 Fu Hao was a woman in the Shang elite, married to the king and buried around 1200 BC. But scientific testing on the “ jades” in her tomb suggests that a variety of jade-like stones were used, such as a marble-type nephrite “Anyang jade,” sassurite mined in the mountains of Henan in central China. There are few nephrite pieces, and their origin is uncertain.87 This would seem to be supported by the argument, mentioned above in relation to the diffusion of mirrors, that the Hexi corridor route between the steppe and China was not very active at this time, having been replaced by the Northern Zone route. However, it must be said that jade from Khotan could also have traveled north, on routes across the Taklamakan and the Tianshan to the steppe and then to China.
A few centuries later, an early Chinese text, Guanzi, attributed to Guan Zhong (ca. 720–645 BC), refers to the Yuezhi as a people who supplied jade to the Chinese. The Yuezhi lived in the Hexi corridor and would have been ideally placed to control the trade. This suggests that the route had opened up again. By the time of our earrings, however, the Yuezhi had been driven out by the Xiongnu, thus giving the Xiongnu control of this important route— and of the jade supply into China. This was a good reason for the Chinese Qin and then the Han to try to seize control of the route. After the Han successes, it seems there was a plentiful supply of Khotan jade in China, exemplified by Han burial suits.88 The Han also protected the routes by building walls to the north of the Ordos and from Wuwei to the northwest of Dunhuang—the Hexi corridor.89
WOMEN ON THE STEPPE
The fact that the most richly endowed tomb excavated so far in the Xigoupan complex is that of a woman calls for comment. The comparable treatment of men and women in death is not unique to Xigoupan. Kathryn Linduff discusses the cemetery at Daodunzi in the southwestern Ordos. On the basis of Chinese coin finds, it can be dated from the end of the second century to the first century BC, and twenty-seven graves have been excavated here, nine of which are of women and seven of men. The tombs include pit burials, as at Xigoupan with supine bodies facing northwest, but also catacomb tombs, and the female burials include chambers for the remains of sacrificed animals: cattle, sheep, and horses.