The discovery of three tombs at Mawangdui in Hunan Province, China in 1972 yielded thousands of artifacts, including some of the world’s oldest preserved silk paintings, clothing, and textiles. All three date to the Western Han dynasty in the 2nd century B.C.E. and belonged to a family of Han Chinese aristocrats.

Tomb 1 belonged to a female aristocrat named Xīn Zhuī 辛追, popularly known as “Lady Dai” (who died in 168 B.C.E.)

Tomb 2 belonged to the noble Lì Cāng 利蒼, Marquis of Dai, Lady Dai’s husband (who died in 186 B.C.E.)

Tomb 3 belonged to Lady Dai’s son (who also died in 168 B.C.E.) [1]

When it was discovered, Lady Dai’s tomb was in a remarkable state of preservation with wooden objects and silks in near perfect condition, as though immune to the ravages of time. Although the construction of Lady Dai’s tomb, the largest of the three, disrupted the tombs of her husband and son, leaving them in a lesser state of preservation, all three tombs help us reconstruct this ancient family’s vision of the afterlife.

Structure of the Mawangdui Tombs

During the Western Han dynasty, elaborate tombs were constructed for the elite across the Han empire in an effort to care and appease the spirits of deceased ancestors. The three tombs at Mawangdui are rectangular vertical shaft tombs dug deep into the earth. At the bottom of each shaft, the tombs were originally equipped with a rectangular wooden burial structure (guǒ 椁) constructed of cypress planks fitted together using mortise and tenon joinery.

This type of tomb construction had an earlier precedent and was common in this region during the earlier Eastern Zhou period (771–221 B.C.E.) when it was occupied by the Chǔ 楚 kingdom. As with earlier Chu tombs, the underground wooden burial structures at Mawangdui were compartmentalized. The Mawangdui tombs contained nesting coffins at the center and extensive inventories of burial items in separate chambers surrounding the main coffin chamber. Layers of charcoal and white kaolin clay around the wooden burial structures and pounded earth in the shafts insulated the structures, and, in the case of Lady Dai’s tomb, helped preserve the entire contents, including her body.

Tomb 1

Lady Dai’s underground wooden burial structure was divided into five compartments, including a central coffin chamber surrounded by four compartments on each side for burial furnishings. At the center of the tomb, Lady Dai was buried in a series of four nesting coffins.

The outermost coffin was a plain box, while the three nesting coffins inside were painted with lacquer in black, red, and white. The use of lacquer, a substance derived from the lac tree native to China, is a testament to Lady Dai’s wealth and status in Han society. Lacquer was more valuable than bronze. The application of lacquer involved a tedious process of applying one layer and letting it dry before adding another, increasing the value of the material.

The decoration on the three painted coffins refer to the journey of Lady Dai’s spirit to the afterlife and the world of the immortals. During the Western Han, southerners like Lady Dai believed humans had two souls, a hún 魂 that makes a dangerous journey to the afterlife, or the world of the immortals, and a pò 魄soul that remains in the tomb with the body, enjoying the many funerary offerings within.

The largest of the lacquered coffins has a black background decorated with stylized cloud forms and mythological creatures. On each side of the coffin the cloud forms are bordered by a rectangular frame of abstract patterns. At times, the clouds drift over the frame as though the celestial world populated by horned creatures, feathered immortals, and birds cannot be contained.

The second lacquered coffin has a red background and features auspicious animals, such as tigers and dragons, which are among the protective creatures of the cardinal directions.

On one long side panel of the coffin, two sinuous dragons confront one another at the center of the rectangular panel. On the left, a deer, contorted in a manner that shows influence from “animal style” art of the steppe, is nestled in the body of the dragon. On the right, a feathered immortal seems to dance beneath the arch of the dragon’s body. These auspicious motifs helped to guide and protect Lady Dai’s soul on its journey to immortality.

The innermost coffin is painted with black lacquer and covered with embroidered silk and satin appliqued with red and black feathers, symbolic of the immortals. The theme of immortality is consistent across the three lacquered coffins, perhaps to keep Lady Dai’s hun spirit focused on its destination as it makes the dangerous journey to immortality.

Silks

Laid face down over the top of the innermost coffin was a T-shaped banner made of silk and painted in rich mineral pigments. The painting is a narrative organized vertically from bottom to top in four sections showing Lady Dai’s journey from the terrestrial world (her funeral) to the celestial world of the immortals above.

One interpretation of the iconography at the top of the banner (where the celestial world of the immortals is depicted) is that it represents the popular tale of Archer Yì 後羿 and his wife Cháng’é 嫦娥. On the right side, nine orange orbs float against the blank silk background, interspersed between a dragon and the arms of a writhing vine. The orbs might represent the nine suns the Archer Yi shot down through the branches of a mulberry tree when, one day, ten suns arose at once. On the left side of the scene, the archer’s wife Chang’e flees on the wing of a dragon toward the crescent moon with the archer’s reward for his heroic deed, the elixir of immortality.

In one version of the legend, Chang’e was punished for her theft and turned into a toad. Standing on the crescent moon on Lady Dai’s banner is a toad, which may represent Chang’e’s unfortunate punishment. A rabbit, an animal associated with the legend of Chang’e, leaps over the toad’s head. At the top of this scene is a female figure whose lower body terminates in a serpent’s tail. This may be a representation of Nǔwā 女媧, the creator goddess in Chinese mythology.

Inside the innermost coffin, Lady Dai’s body was carefully wrapped in twenty layers of luxurious embroidered and damask silk shrouds and clothing, tied together with nine silk ribbons.

Her body was perfectly intact and her skin still soft and elastic. An autopsy revealed important details about her health at the time of her death, as well as her last meal, melon. Scientists believe she died of acute gallbladder disease or from a heart attack, but they also discovered she had an unusually high accumulation of mercury and lead in her body, likely from regular ingestion. Mercury was a primary ingredient in the coveted, but ultimately deadly elixir of immortality. The discovery that Lady Dai likely ingested mercury in pursuit of immortality comes as no surprise. From the pictorial program on her lacquered coffins to her funerary banner, immortality was clearly a preoccupation of hers, one she certainly hoped to achieve in life and in death.

Lady Dai’s tomb was furnished with three categories of objects:

1. míngqì 冥器 , or spirit objects, made specifically for burial (for example, the lacquered wood coffins, crude wooden figurines of servants and musicians dressed in painted or real silks, and clay coins made in imitation of real money)
2. objects the tomb occupant used in her daily life (for example,  household furniture, a lacquer toilet box, lacquer kitchenware (including the earliest known pair of chopsticks), musical instruments, and sumptuous silk clothing and accessories fit for the afterlife of an elite Han aristocrat
3. a wide assortment of foodstuffs (meats, vegetables, fruits, cereals, etc.) for cooking and banqueting

A brief note on Tomb 3

Although tombs 2 and 3 belonging to Lady Dai’s husband and son were in a lesser state of preservation upon discovery, Tomb 3 still yielded over 1,000 artifacts. Like Lady Dai, her son’s tomb was furnished with an assortment of mingqi, objects he owned in his lifetime, as well as provisions to keep his spirit appeased in the afterlife. Four silk paintings were preserved from his tomb, including a T-shaped banner similar in iconography to Lady Dai’s and found draped over his innermost coffin. These are among the earliest silk paintings in the history of Chinese art. Perhaps the most important discovery in his tomb, however, was an archive of texts written on bamboo, wood, and silk. These included well known works like the Lǎozǐ 老子, attributed to the 6th century B.C.E. Daoist philosopher Laozi; the Yǐjīng 已經 (Book of Changes), an ancient divination text; as well as important medical, astronomical, and cosmological texts, just to name a few. The Laozi manuscripts found in Tomb 3 are still, to this day, the earliest extant copies known.

Important insights

Discoveries from Tombs 1 and 3 at Mawangdui give us important insight into the lives and afterlife beliefs of an elite family living in south China during the Western Han dynasty. For the “Dai” family, furnishing the tombs with the comforts of home ensured a peaceful afterlife for the po soul, while a consistent visual program focusing on the journey to the celestial world equipped the hun soul for the  search for immortality.

 

Notes:

[1] The occupants of the tombs and the dates of their deaths were identified by inscriptions on artifacts in the tombs. The tombs were labeled 1, 2, and 3 based on the order in which they were discovered.

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Additional resources:

Pirazzoli-tʼSerstevens, Michèle, The Han Dynasty, translated by Janet Seligman (New York: Rizzoli, 1982).

Cite this page as: Dr. Cortney E. Chaffin, “The search for immortality: The Tomb of Lady Dai,” in Smarthistory, January 10, 2022, accessed April 30, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/tomb-of-lady-dai/.

Maybe you can bring it with you…if you are rich enough. The elite men and women of the Han dynasty enjoyed an opulent lifestyle that could stretch into the afterlife. Today, the well-furnished tombs of the elite give us a glimpse of the luxurious goods they treasured and enjoyed. For instance, a wealthy official could afford beautiful silk robes in contrast to the homespun or paper garments of a laborer or peasant. Their tombs also inform us about their cosmological beliefs.

Marquis of Dai, Lady Dai, and a son

Three elite tombs, discovered in 1972, at Mawangdui, Hunan Province (eastern China) rank amongst the greatest archeological discoveries in China during the 20th century. They are the tombs of a high-ranking Han official civil servant, the Marquis of Dai, Lady Dai (his wife), and their son. The Marquis died in 186 B.C.E., and his wife and son both died by 163 B.C.E. The Marquis’ tomb was not in good condition when it was discovered. However, the objects in the son’s and wife’s tombs were of extraordinary quality and very well preserved. From these objects, we can see that Lady Dai and her son were to spend the afterlife in sumptuous comfort.

In Lady Dai’s tomb, archaeologists found a painted silk banner over six feet long in excellent condition. The T-shaped banner was on top of the innermost of four nesting coffins. Although scholars still debate the function of these banners, we know they had some connection with the afterlife. They may be “name banners” used to identify the dead during the mourning ceremonies, or they may have been burial shrouds intended to aid the soul in its passage to the afterlife. Lady Dai’s banner is important for two primary reasons. It is an early example of pictorial (representing naturalistic scenes, not just abstract shapes) art in China. Secondly, the banner features the earliest known portrait in Chinese painting.

We can divide Lady Dai’s banner into four horizontal registers. In the lower central register, we see Lady Dai in an embroidered silk robe leaning on a staff. This remarkable portrait of Lady Dai is the earliest example of a painted portrait of a specific individual in China. She stands on a platform along with her servants–two in front and three behind.

Long, sinuous dragons frame the scene on either side, and their white and pink bodies loop through a bi (a disc with a hole thought to represent the sky) underneath Lady Dai. We understand that this is not a portrait of Lady Dai in her former life, but an image of her in the afterlife enjoying the immortal comforts of her tomb as she ascends toward the heavens.

In the register below the scene of Lady Dai, we see sacrificial funerary rituals taking place in a mourning hall. Tripod containers and vase-shaped vessels for offering food and wine stand in the foreground. In the middle ground, seated mourners line up in two rows. Look for the mound in the center, between the two rows of mourners. If you look closely, you can see the patterns on the silk that match the robe Lady Dai wears in the scene above. Her corpse is wrapped in her finest robe! More vessels appear on a shelf in the background.

In the mourning scene, we can also appreciate the importance of Lady Dai’s banner for understanding how artists began to represent depth and space in early Chinese painting. They made efforts to indicate depth through the use of the overlapping bodies of the mourners. They also made objects in the foreground larger, and objects in the background smaller, to create the illusion of space in the mourning hall.

The afterlife in Han dynasty China

Lady Dai’s banner gives us some insight into cosmological beliefs and funeral practices of Han dynasty China. Above and below the scenes of Lady Dai and the mourning hall, we see images of heaven and the underworld. Toward the top, near the cross of the “T,” two men face each other and guard the gate to the heavenly realm. Directly above the two men, at the very top of the banner, we see a deity with a human head and a dragon body.

On the left, a toad standing on a crescent moon flanks the dragon/human deity. On the right, we see what may be a three-legged crow within a pink sun. The moon and the sun are emblematic of a supernatural realm above the human world. Dragons and other immortal beings populate the sky. In the lower register, beneath the mourning hall, we see the underworld populated by two giant black fish, a red snake, a pair of blue goats, and an unidentified earthly deity. The deity appears to hold up the floor of the mourning hall, while the two fish cross to form a circle beneath him. The beings in the underworld symbolize water and earth, and they indicate an underground domain below the human world.

Four compartments surrounded Lady Dai’s central tomb, and they offer some sense of the life she was expected to lead in the afterlife. The top compartment represented a room where Lady Dai was supposed to sit while having her meal. In this compartment, researchers found cushions, an armrest, and her walking stick. The compartment also contained a meal laid out for her to eat in the afterlife. Lady Dai was 50 years old when she died, but her lavish tomb—marked by her funeral banner—ensured that she would enjoy the comforts of her earthly life for eternity.

This essay was written with the assistance of Dr. Wu Hung.

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Additional resources

This object at the Hunan Provincial Museum

More on the funeral banner of Lady Dai from Hunan Provincial Museum

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Death and material culture in early China

Fong Chow, “Ma-wang-tui. A Treasure-Trove from the Western Han Dynasty,” Artibus Asiae, volume 35, number 1/2 (1973), pp. 5–14.

Wu Hung, The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Cite this page as: Dr. Jennifer N. McIntire, “Funeral banner of Lady Dai (Xin Zhui),” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed April 30, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/funeral-banner-of-lady-dai-xin-zhui/.