Buddhist Woodcuts under the Tangut and Mongol Rules

• In Event: Artistic Multiplicity in China’s Middle Period

Abstract

Religious woodcuts serve as an effective means to evaluate cultural transformation, as they cross media and transcend geo-culture. Unlike other visual media, such as murals from tombs and temples, woodblock images printed on paper were affordable, ephemeral, portable, and replicable. The printed illustrations accompanying mass-produced Buddhist texts were accessible to a large audience encompassing many cultures spread across different regions. Compared to a religious text written in a specific language that limited its readership, a printed image circulating alongside religious writings presented no language barrier and thus exerted an even wider impact beyond its original religious or cultural context.
The Inner Asian peoples active during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries served as important agents of woodcut transmission and cultural exchange, evident in woodcuts that attest to the participation of the Tanguts, Mongols, and Uighurs. This paper evaluates the legacy and interrelationship of Buddhist woodcuts produced under the Xi Xia and Mongol rules. One of the most important primary source repositories associated with the Xi Xia comprises more than one hundred Buddhist printed illustrations, excavated in Khara Khoto, Inner Mongolia. Some of these woodcuts were associated with other regimes, revealing transcultural and cross-regional exchanges. During the Yuan dynasty, selected Tangut monks relocating from the Xi Xia territory to the Jiangnan area promoted the printing of Xi Xia-inspired Buddhist woodcuts in Hangzhou. The Xi Xia-inspired Yuan woodcuts further spread to Korea through the Mongol’s network and exerted an impact on Korean visual culture.

Author

• Shihshan Susan Huang, Rice University