115. For description of the old burial practices of the people of Dai, see SoS 95.2322, which among other things relates that the deceased’s clothing, as well as horse gear, was burnt as part of the funeral. We will see this practice below with the death of the emperor Wencheng. See also Ni, Guang zhai Zhongyuan, Chapter 2. In personal communication, the archaeologist Fan Zhang points out that choice of tomb style was not simply a matter of wealth, since some Pingcheng pit tombs (including M107 and M109 of the Nanjiao cemetery) contained “luxury burial goods, including the imported gilt silver vessels.”
116. Tseng, Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 74.
117. WS 27.665, in which the man’s surname is given in Sinicized form as Mu 穆, an eminent family within Dai. For this lineage, see Yao, Bei chao Hu xing kao, 25–28.
118. Tseng, The Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 85, suggests that placement of the subjects in fixed structures may be convention rather than accurate description of the reality of these events. It should be noted that a second image of the couple was also produced for the tomb, on the lacquer covering of the coffin: see “Shanxi Datong Shaling Bei Wei bi hua mu fa jue jian bao,” 13, figure 19.
119. Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 1, 42.
120. This creative pictorial depiction of hierarchy was, of course, not confined to Dai tombs, being well known in the south as well, in the paintings of such as Gu Kaizhi; see Müller, “Lacquerware,” 56, citing Furuta Shinichi 古田真一, on the exchange of paintings between Pingcheng and the Yangtze region: “Rikucho· kaiga ni kansuru ichi ko·satsu—Shiba Kinryū bo shutsudo no shiga byōbu o megutte” 六朝絵画に关する一考察—司马金龙墓出土の漆画屏风をめぐって, Bigaku 42.4 (1992): 57–67.
121. I do this cautiously, keeping in mind caution given by Fan Zhang in personal communication that it is problematic “to link a depicted figure with a specific personage,” since the images are fundamentally “part of the formulaic composition available at the workshops.”
122. Zhang, “Cultural Encounters,” 70.
123. Tseng, Making of the Northern Wei, 82, puts this well in her suggestion that we see in this and other Pingcheng sites the tomb as “functional space in which a myriad of performances intersected to define the deceased by his or her role in society,” which she contrasts with the “module” style of Han funerary art (75–76).
124. This began with the princes: see Zhang Hequan 张鹤泉, “Bei Wei qian qi feng shou zhu wang jue wei jia bai jiang jun hao zhi du shi tan” 北魏堑期封授诸王爵位加拜将军号制度试探, Shi xue yue kan (2012.11): 14–21. Miyazaki Ichisada 宫崎市定,九品官人法の硏究: 科举堑史 (Kyōto: Tōyōshi Kenkyūkai, 1956), 408, discusses the reduction of most at least of generalships to prestige titles (san guan 散官). This will be seen in concrete form in Chapter 14’s discussion of Emperor Wencheng’s “Nan xun bei.” Based on conclusions reached in Chapter 11, it seems fair to infer that part of the reason for assignment of military rank was probably the salary that accompanied such titles.
125. Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 26; Wang, “Datong Bei Wei mu zang chu tu yong qun de shi dai te shu,” 302; Tseng, The Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 87–88.
126. See a clear portrayal of the distinctions based on miniature statuary in Liu Junxi and Li Li, “The Recent Discovery of a Group of Northern Wei Tombs in Datong,” Orientations 33.5 (2002): 44.
127. Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 14.
128. In the Ming dynasty, see Kenneth Swope, “The Beating of Drums and Clashing of Symbols: Music in Ming Dynasty Military Operations,” Chinese Historical Review 16:2 (2009): 147–77; and further afield, Kate Van Orden, Music, Discipline and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
129. Examples of female cavalry are given in Chapter 11.
130. Timothy Davis, Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 354.
131. Mary Douglas, cited by Kaori O’Connor in her The Never-ending Feast: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Feasting (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 15. Or as Epicurus said: “We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink” (3). And once we’ve done so, says Ian Sansom in his Times Literary Supplement 18 December 2018 article titled “Jubilant Devastation,” we should remember that according to a magazine called Good Housekeeping, Christmas dinner is “instrumental, a way of asserting one’s dominance over the food, oneself and one’s guests.”
132. Or at least his “cynical acquiescence”: Michael Dietler, “Clearing the Table: Some Concluding Reflections on Commensal Politics and Imperial States,” in The Archaeology of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003), 272. In connection with this, Dietler points out how the feast has played a powerful, ongoing role within the arena created by fixed monuments and institutions, and never could be entirely replaced by them.
133. In another piece, Michael Dietler argues that the “potential of food and hospitality to be manipulated as a toll in defining social relations lies at the crux of the notion of commensal politics”: “Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy,” in Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Polly Wiessner and Wulf Schiefenh·vel (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 91.
134. O’Connor, Never-ending Feast, 46. See also Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 191–92.
135. Tamara L. Bray, “Commensal Politics of Early States and Empires,” in The Archaeology of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, 6; on p. 1 of the same work, Bray defines “feasting” as a “communal food consumption event that differs in some way from everyday practice.” For the multiple purposes of the feast, see O’Connor, Never-ending Feast, 9.
136. Tseng, The Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 76; and for depiction in poetry of the feast as the man’s, see Tian, Halberd at Red Cliff, 89. See general discussion of male appropriation of food and its presentation by Carolyn Clark (“Land and Food, Women and Power in Nineteenth Century Kikuyu,” Africa 50 [1980]: 357–70, cited by Michael Dietler, “Clearing the Table,” 279). In her article (367), Clark asks whether women are “controllers of resources or themselves resources controlled by men·” In the Poduoluo Lady’s tomb, at least, it seems to be the former, which Dietler goes on in his discussion of Clark’s question to note occurs in at least some cases.
137. Though in the palace, we are told by a critical observer from Jiankang, they would sit on chairs with their legs splayed out: Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 25, citing NQS 57.986.
138. Seo, “Cong Shaling bi hua mu,” 177.
139. This is said of a woman who had married Wenming’s brother, Feng Xi: BS 13.499 (WS 13.332). It certainly extended beyond this family, applying to most at least of the elite households of Pingcheng, and later Luoyang as well. Drawing upon funerary inscriptions, Wang Yongping 王永平 describes the power of women within elite households in Chapter 17 of迁洛元魏皇族与士族社会文化史论 (Beijing: Zhongguo she hui ke xue chu ban she, 2017).
140. WS 30.803. This anecdote is raised by Song, Bei Wei nü zhu lun, 196, in discussion of the power of feasting. And see Alice Gregory’s mention of “the archetype of woman as family ambassador” in her article “Finished: Life at the Last Swiss Bastion of Etiquette Training,” New Yorker, 8 October 2018.
141. Zhang and Wang, “Bei Wei huang di ci yan kao lüe,” 29. In WS 2.33 see creation of an officer for manners at feasts, at least for Daowu’s feasts. For broader study of feast and hierarchy, see O’Connor, Never-ending Feast, 50; and Bray, who in her “Commensal Politics of Early States and Empires,” 9, speaks powerfully of “pots as functioning objects and the relationship between pottery and food in articulating, defining, and negotiating identity and power,” helping us gain further insight into why Daowu took the craftsmen and forcibly brought them up into the highlands.
142. Mauss, The Gift, 41: “The obligation to accept is no less constraining. One has no right to refuse a gift, or to refuse to attend the potlatch” (the italics are Mauss’s). This is, of course, an essential part of Mauss’s vision of “the gift.”
143. Tseng, Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 76–78.
144. See discussion of manufacture of these goods in Müller, “Lacquerware.”
145. For discussion of entertainments, see Zhang and Wang, “Bei Wei huang di ci yan kao lüe,” 30; and more broadly still, focusing on the Tang, Wang Yongping 王永平,游戏, 竞技与娱乐: 中古社会生活透视 (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 2010).
146. WS 109.2828.
147. Cheng, “Exchange across Media,” 117–18, as part of a broader discussion of west-east exchange throughout the article.
148. Tseng, Making of the Tuoba Northern Wei, 88–89; Seo, “Cong Shaling bi hua mu,” 174.
149. These imports are much discussed: inter alia, see Wang Yanqing 王雁卿, “Bei chao shi dai de yin shi qi ju” 北朝时代的饮食器疽, Bei chao yan jiu 4 (2004): 158–68; examples of these vessels in Liu Junxi, ed., Datong nan jiao Bei Wei mu qun, 224–43; Boris I. Marshak, “Central Asian Metalwork in China,” in China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 ad, ed. James C. Y. Watt et al. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 46–55; and Dien’s discussion of “exotics” in Six Dynasties Civilization, 275–86. For a more general discussion of the influx of goods with direct opening of Pingcheng to the Silk Roads, see Wang, “Si chou zhi lu yu Bei Wei Pingcheng,” 143–61. Fan Zhang, “Silver Handled Cup: Syncretism, Materiality, and Banquets in Northern Wei Art,” Artibus Asiae 82.1 (2022): 6, notes that while popular among Serbi, such objects were apparently resisted by Chinese living in the Pingcheng area.
150. WS 4B.97. Private maintenance of Buddhist monks and other sorts of sorcerers were banned in the same pronouncement.
151. See pictures of the ceramics found in the tomb in “Shanxi Datong Shaling Bei Wei bi hua mu fa jue jian bao,” 8, 10, 11.
152. See discussion of the foodstuffs eaten at feasts in Lü Yifei 吕一飞, 胡族习俗与隋唐风韵: 魏晋北朝北方少数民族社会风俗及其对隋唐的影响 (Beijing: Shu mu wen xian chu ban she, 1994), Chapter 2; and Zhang and Wang, “Bei Wei huang di ci yan kao lüe,” 29–30. In viewing these materials, we need to remember the findings on meat eating among some—but only some—of the people of Dai of Hou Liangliang et al., “Nong ye qu you mu min zu yin shi wen hua de zhi hou xing.”
153. Lü, Hu zu xi su yu Sui Tang feng yun, 51.
154. Luoyang qie lan ji jiao zhu 3.147–48; with modification, the translation comes from Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 215–16. See also the discussion in Pearce, Ebrey, and Spiro, “Introduction,” in Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, 21–22.
155. Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 25.
156. See discussion of women’s control of grain stores among the Kikuyu in Kenya, by Clark, “Land and Food, Women and Power,” 365–66.
157. See detailed discussion given in Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 25. Bunker, Ancient Bronzes, 91–92, discusses a Serbi bronze cauldron excavated from the Hohhot region, dated to the fourth century.
158. Lin, “Bei Wei Shaling bi hua mu yan jiu,” 26; and discussion of this general concept in Collingham’s The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World.
159. Sagawa, “You mu yu nong geng zhi jian.” On markets, see Li Hu 黎虎, ed., Han Tang yin shi wen hua shi 汉唐饮食文化史 (Beijing: Beijing shi fan da xue chu ban she, 1998), 185–86.
160. WS 58.1289. For a survey of stock rearing down on the Yellow River plains during this period, see Keith Knapp, “The Use and Understanding of Domestic Animals in Early Medieval Northern China,” EMC 25 (2019): 85–99.
161. Huang, “Tuoba Xianbei zao qi guo jia de xing cheng,” 84–90, discusses the use of slaves as among other things herdsmen. This would have been the “herdsman husbandry” described by Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 22.
162. See Liu, ed., Datong Yan bei shi yuan Bei Wei mu qun, 66–67 and color plates 41 and 42; and mention in an English-language article by Liu and Li, “The Recent Discovery of a Group of Northern Wei Tombs in Datong,” 46–47. A yurt model was also found in the tomb of Sima Jinlong: see Wang Yanqing 王雁卿, “Bei Wei Sima Jinlong mu chu tu de you tao zhan zhang mo xing” 北魏司马金龙墓出土的釉陶毡帐模型, Zhongguo guo jia bo wu guan guan kan (2012.4): 56–62.
163. For an overview of pastoralism under Wei, see Zhang Yanli 张谚丽, “Qian lun Bei Wei xu mu ye de fa zhan ji ying xiang” 铅论北魏畜牧业的发展及影响, Jincheng zhi ye ji shu xue yuan xue bao 8.4 (2015): 51–53.
164. Koga, “Hokugi no buzoku kaisan ni tsuite,” 6. For the Pilou: BQS 15.196, where the name transcription Pilou 疋娄 is given in abbreviated Chinese form as “Lou”; see Yao, Bei chao Hu xing kao, 98–99.
