The Camel's Load in Life and Death: Iconography and Ideology of Chinese Pottery Figurines from Han to Tang and their Relevance to Trade along the Silk Routes.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

The Camel's Load in Life and Death: Iconography and Ideology of Chinese Pottery Figurines from Han to Tang and their Relevance to Trade along the Silk Routes. By ELFRIEDE REGINA KNAUER. Zurich: AKANTHUS, 1998. Pp. 159 + illus., maps. $38 (paper).

Next to the beautifully muscular, three-color glazed horses now to be seen everywhere throughout the world in museum and living-room, the Bactrian or two-humped camel was the most often depicted animal among Tang ceramics originally created as mortuary objects. Many of these camels stand with necks flexed powerfully backward and upward, their mouths open and their teeth bared as if braying proudly at the sky. Some, perhaps the most famous examples, bear small and physically incredible orchestras of up to eight foreign (i.e., non-Chinese) musicians on their backs. But all--befitting their status as prime beasts of burden--carry some sort of load, and it is with this feature that E. R. Knauer's monograph is concerned.

As suggested by its subtitle, this study begins many centuries before the Tang and is an excursion into trade, thought, burial practice, and much else besides art history. The book is divided into sixteen sections, ranging in length from a paragraph to twenty-six pages. Nearly a hundred illustrations, many in color, grace the volume and give point to the author's words. Footnotes are numerous and, moreover, substantial, probably outpacing the text in total number of lines, citing scores of relevant works and often becoming small essays in themselves. Beginning with two sections ("Introduction" and "The Subject of this Study," pp. 10-19) in which she lays groundwork geographical, cultural, and comparative, Knauer proceeds with a chronological examination of the scholarship on and the history of the camel in China that stretches from the pre-imperial period to the Ming dynasty. Attention is paid too to some rare depictions of camels on buckles, plaques, and torques from Inner Asia. But the main focus is on the millennium from the Han through the Tang, the first thousand years of trade and traffic along the Silk Roads that brought China and the countries of the Near East into regular if indirect contact with one another. Statuettes of camels used as mingqi ("articles of the spirit") or mortuary furnishings are found throughout this time and evince both a stylistic and symbolic development.

One of the first, and not the least useful, of Knauer's contributions is the identification of the...