 So, today, we're very fortunate to have Professor Nicholas Tacheth, who is from the history department here on the campus and associate professor here in the department of history. And he actually works in historic China and works with material things in historic China, which is great. Primarily tomb belongings, and I guess we'll be getting some of that today, but I want to mention two books he just told me about that you might find very interesting that he's published. The first one in 2014 is called The Destruction of Medieval Chinese Aristocracy, the title on tomb at the pass. And his more recent book that's out next month called The Origins of the Chinese Nation, which takes which is 11th century. So, he's using a lot of material, materiality in his historical work. So, we're really pleased to have him here, new affiliate of our group as well. So, please welcome Professor Tacheth. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. So, what I am going to talk about today is 11th century China. And in the, and here is a map to get us started during the 11th century East Asia and specifically North East Asia was divided up among two major empires. There was the Song Empire to the south, and then the Liao Empire, which was founded by Qitans from the Eurasian steppe to the north. The boundary dividing these two empires, the political boundary, was set at a somewhat unusual location. It crossed the North China Plain as suggested here, which was, again, one can think of this as an unusual geopolitical arrangement where what one might think of as a natural cultural zone, the North China Plain, was split in two between these two empires. In later times, according to, from the perspective of Chinese historians writing in the Ming dynasty and later, and even already by the 13th century, they were arguing that this region of the southernmost part of the Liao Empire should have been part of the Song Empire. It was naturally Chinese and should not have been part of a Qitan Empire. This region was referred to as the 16 prefectures. It more or less spanned this region here. The eastern part of these 16 prefectures is referred to as Yan, and this will come up in my talk. And so it's worth remembering that. So Yan was a region that was controlled by the Qitan Liao Empire, but in later times would be perceived as a region that ought to be part of a Chinese Empire and, for example, ought to have been part of the Song dynasty. So one of the questions, one way, one version of the question I want to ask today is essentially how did the political boundary, as well as some sort of cultural boundary further north, how are these different boundaries reflected in the material culture of this region? How did they, how did the political and cultural boundaries affect culture as reflected in material culture, and specifically the material culture of tombs? When considering this question, it is worth bearing in mind that not only were the Yan mountains, not only did they constitute a natural cultural boundary, but in fact, this boundary was integrated into Liao ethnic policies. So there was concerted efforts to manage different ethnic groups within the Liao Empire. The Liao Empire, again, had been founded by Qitans from the Eurasian steppe, and they conceived of their empire as a multi-ethnic empire. It was conceived that way. There are various bits of evidence of this, but I will point out that it's been often argued that on the Eurasian steppe, there are specific, it's common to encounter, basically, ethnic divisions on the steppe and for ethnicity to then become part of how the empires conceive of themselves and how they organize their administrations. In the case of the Qitans, it's interesting various ways in which the Qitans portrayed themselves in ways not unlike the Manchus would later on. The Manchus also came from this northeastern region and would establish the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty, and they, too, had a very clear ethnic policy by means of which they classified the different peoples of their empire into different groups that were subject to different legal regimes. And then they, too, like the Qitans made use of certain similar ethnic markers. Hair was an important ethnic marker. The male hairstyle consisted of two tufts of hair hanging from the sides, two sides of the head. The Manchus also had something similar going on. They had the Q in the back of the head. This was the male hairstyle. The difference being that the Manchus imposed their hairstyle on the entire Chinese population, whereas the Qitans maintained it as a marker of distinction. These two images here are line drawings that I made based on the left, song court paintings. And it's actually three different details from, so it's not a single painting, but three different details from different song court paintings. And on the right, one has three different details from the al-Tum murals. So different ways of depicting Qitans and their daily life, both from the perspective of the Qitans themselves in their own tombs and from the perspective of the Song, Song Chinese. And I do think it's interesting that one sees similarities in how the Qitans are portrayed notably as essentially pastoral nomadic warriors. You can see them with their horses and with their bows and arrows. One also sees evidence of their nomadic lifestyles, their houses on wheels with the camels to pull them around. And then there's also an interesting element of these depictions of Qitan life, which consists of these large metal cauldrons that are boiling large chunks of meat. This is also an element that one encounters in a number of different representations of Qitan life, that is life on the step from this particular way of portraying it. And it's interesting, again, that there's this focus on those recurrent elements. And I'll come back to that in just a second. Now, ways in which, there are various ways in which it's clear that the Viao Empire was organized on these ethnic lines. So there were four basic people included in the empire. There were the Qitans, there were Han, and these were the ethnic Chinese. There were also Parhe and Xi, so four different groups. And one encounters them throughout the documents pertaining to the organization of the Viao state. And for example, one finds lots of official titles or names of bureaus that make reference to multiple, to two or more different people. So you have, for example, the chief administration office of the Han and Parhe peoples of the Chongda Ordo. So that's a basic administrative unit. But again, what's interesting is, and what I want to point out and highlight is that different people were part of this empire. They were conceived, the empire was conceived as being composed of multiple different people and what encounters that all over the place in descriptions of the Viao administration. It was also true that this meant, from one of the reasons for doing this is that the Viao understood that different people were managed in different ways. The most obvious distinction was gonna be between the Chinese who were thought of as agriculturalists and the Qitans who were thought of as pastoral nomads and relied on an entirely different economy. The way it was put in the history of Viao was that the Viao ought to use national institutions, meaning Qitan institutions to govern the Qitans and then Han institutions, meaning Chinese institutions in treating the Han people. So there was a sense that this was a necessary element of successfully ruling this multi-ethnic empire was to break up the administration into separate units for dealing with different people. There's other places in which one encounters the question of ethnicity in specifically in a state that is the things organized by the Viao state, events organized by the Viao state. So for example, at diplomatic banquets, when you had Song officials in Viao territory, Song diplomats in Viao territory, they would have banquets every evening. And it's interesting that the description of the banquets seemed to involve a deliberate effort to perform ethnicity, according to certain preconceived ethnic categories. And so what I find striking about this particular description of the banquet from a written by a Song envoy of the early 11th century is that in fact, there were very large chunks of meat that were served to the Song envoy. The Song would not eat these large chunks of meat because they can't, they eat with chopsticks, they don't eat with their hands. This is important and they stuck to that. And therefore, the Qitans had to assign them pages who would cut the meat into smaller pieces so that they could eat them with chopsticks. So from the way I read this is that basically there's a recognition that there are these different eating practices that these are ethnic markers, these are ways of distinguishing the Qitans from the Chinese and this is deliberately then acted out in these diplomatic banquets, organized by the Liao state. Now, besides classifying people into different groups, the Liao also reorganized the ethnic geography of Northeast Asia and this was directly linked to the fact that they were using different administrations, different institutions for managing Han Chinese versus Qitans and so what they did, it is certainly indicated in the sources is that they did relocate people around, there's lots of accounts of forcible migrations to move different groups of people around the empire and by this means organizing the ethnic geography in a way that made more sense from the perspective of the institutions. As a result, the Song envoys themselves noticed this as they were traveling and specifically they noticed that the region of Yan was inhabited by Chinese and so one envoy points out that the residents of Yan customarily all wear Han clothing, another one points out that south of the Yan Mountains, that is the region of Yan, the clothing and language are all according to old customs that is the Chinese language, Chinese clothing, this is what the people are speaking and wearing and then another envoy in a poem writes that the frontier of Yan ends at Gubei Pass, a pass that threw the Yan Mountains to the north of the North China Plain beyond which the mountains dissipate into numerous flat field and here you have Xi people building grass huts, you have Qitan horse carts and so basically a description of a changing cultural ecology as soon as you get past the mountains to the north of the North China Plain. So again, the point of all this then is to emphasize that there was a political boundary here but there was a cultural and ethnic boundary further north, a cultural ethnic boundary that in some sense may have been a natural divide in so far as it divided the agriculturally rich North China Plain from the regions further north but the important point to make is that the Liao state was actively involved in reinforcing this boundary such that there really was a clear ethnic divide when the Liao diplomats passed through this region. So what I was then interested in doing was to really try to analyze and examine how this political boundary and this cultural boundary then had an impact on culture and to study culture I used, I focused on material culture and to be more precise the material culture of tombs. I put together a database which can be downloaded from my website, a database that actually spans the earlier Tang dynasty. So it covers roughly the seventh through the 13th century but lots of the tombs are from the 11th century, the period in question that I'm talking about today. So lots, it's based, the database was based on basically I went through all of the published archeological reports I could find going back to the 1950s. I stopped about 2010 but there were lots of archeological reports in all sorts of different publications. Most were in archeological, in the Chinese archeological journals but there were also a certain number of reports published as separate volumes. So about 1700 tombs and in the database I included data on tomb contents, so mostly various grave goods, mural motifs. There are not a lot of murals that survive from these tombs but there's enough to draw interesting conclusions looking for regional patterns. I also included data on architectures of the layout, that the shape of the tomb of the floor plan of the tomb and certain other specific elements that occur recurrently in tombs of this period and then of course latitude and longitude coordinates which is obviously essential for mapping these tombs. The latitude and longitude coordinates I estimate are correct within about five miles so it's good for making large maps but not for actually finding a tomb in the field. I got the coordinates, a lot of these reports simply have a description, a textual description of the place so then you have to go to a map, track down this place and then find the latitude and longitude coordinates and enter it into the database so it took quite a bit of time to put this together. Now based on this database, I actually did more than one study, I had an earlier study where I was looking for change between the tongue and the song and this was related to an entirely different question but pertinent to the question that I'm discussing today has to do with trying to reconstruct different cultural repertoires that one could then claim this is, identifies ketone tombs, this identifies this set of features, identifies Chinese tombs and it actually took quite a bit of work. Already some Chinese archeologists who had produced some lists of differences between these two types of tombs so that was a good starting point but then I had to do it really on an empirical basis, look for what are the sets of objects or tomb features that tend to cluster together and it was ultimately possible to come up with a list of features that by and large are useful for distinguishing these two types of tombs and the differences are actually pretty striking so we're not talking about subtle differences in the patterns on pottery, we're talking about pretty radical differences in terms of tomb content. To give you some example, a lot of the Chinese type tombs basically they were organized around some sort of afterlife banquet. It's very clear that the tomb was the site of an afterlife banquet. This actually ties in interesting ways to the sorts of rituals performed on behalf of the deceased. After death, rituals where food is offered to the spirit of the deceased and a lot of the way in which the food is positioned relative to either the deceased in the tomb or the ancestral tablet that is above ground suggests a common pattern. You basically lay out the food in front of the deceased and the deceased is imagined to consume it and basically to remain content. This was important from the Chinese perspective because basically you want the spirit to stay in the tomb and not go anywhere else so you have this nice afterlife banquet. In Chinese tombs this appears in a number of different ways. Very often you have the mural itself depicting a banquet and it's interesting that there's this sort of virtual reality element to the tombs because there's a common masonry technique where the bricks actually project out of the wall of the tomb so you can make out a chair and a table. The chair and the table are often empty. There's no one painted. We can see a servant behind but the chair itself is empty. This is where the deceased presumably would sit and then you have the food laid out on the table in the mural and there's often interesting interactions between the mural and the space of the tomb itself. One also finds these, there'll be these painted, for example these painted lamps where you put a candle on top and then there'll be a brick sticking out of the wall and an actual bowl will have been placed there that presumably contained a burning candle when the tomb was sealed. So again there's both this depiction of an afterlife banquet and this way in which the walls of the tomb are integrated into the content of the tomb such that one can imagine that the deceased is enjoying the banquet as in sort of a virtual way. By contrast, ketan tombs contain very different sorts of objects and objects not surprisingly associated with pastoral nomadic warriors. You have lots of weapons in tombs. You do not have weapons in the Chinese tombs. Also lots of horse equipment, so depicted here is what remains of a wood saddle, also a metal stirrup and then some horse bells. And so all of these are associated either with horses or weaponry. Again, none of this is typically found in a Chinese type tomb and there's other features as well and I won't go through all of them but I do wanna suggest that there are radical differences. It's not subtle that these different types of tombs. I made some efforts to look basically for patterns to establish that there was a particular patterns of clustering in terms of different sets of objects. So basically just look at this table, simply cross tabulates tombs, what percentage of tombs contains both objects at once and on the basis of this, I think one can see pretty clearly two basic types of tombs. Upper left would be the Qitan tombs, lower right would be the Chinese type tombs and then it's important to note that there are some, there's a set of objects that does commonly occur in both types of tombs. Now when one looks at these, what one might call hybrid tombs that contains both of these types of objects, one finds an interesting result which is that these tombs often will group, so the specific objects in question were a set of basically Chinese ceramic goods so these wine vessels, spittoons, vessels with lotus patterns and also this thing referred to by the Chinese archeologists as chicken thigh bottles because they're apparently shaped like chicken thighs which if you deal with chickens, you probably recognize that right away. In any case, these are a set of ceramics that in these diagrams I'm referring to as Chinese ceramics. So when you have these tombs that look primarily with primarily the Qitan type features but that also include what I'm referring to as Chinese type ceramics, it is interesting that the Chinese ceramics tend to be grouped separately within the tomb. It seems to me that that indicates that at least the people building these tombs conceived of this set of objects as a separate set of things. It's also interesting that often the Chinese type ceramics show up basically in front of the body of the deceased which is also where you find the ceramics laid out on a table in front of the coffin in the Chinese type tomb. So it suggests that this type of hybrid tomb does in fact integrate sort of a conscious effort to distinguish these two types which I think suggests that in the Liao territory they were aware of these as separate cultural components. Okay, so then one can map these different tombs out and so again, looking at the map with the political boundary here between the Song and the Liao state, here I have the red circles indicate Qitan type tombs, the black dots indicate Chinese type tombs and then those Xs are those hybrid type tombs and it is I think quite striking that basically you will not have, when archeologists have not found the Chinese Qitan type tombs south of the Yen Mountains, there are some hybrid tombs right along this kind of line separating the North China Plain from the region beyond but most of the tombs south of the Yen Mountains are of the Chinese type. So once one has classified these tombs in this particular way, there is a clear cultural divide and a cultural divide that is not at, does not map onto the political boundary and this is of course significant. There are a few interesting exceptions and it's hard to tell what the story is behind some of these exceptions but it has been noted by archeologists working in other periods that there was, they've often found some commonalities in the material culture around the Bohai Sea and one could argue in fact that it's not necessarily more difficult to travel between here and here than to get to the end of the Shandong Peninsula from the Chinese interior. Okay, now the way in which the Chinese interpreted this cultural geography was to argue already beginning in the 11th century and this is more apparent in later times that these people here are Chinese and indeed according to the way that the Liao Empire was classifying people, these were Han people and so it was understood that they shared a culture with the people south of the border. The Chinese who saw themselves in the Song Dynasty basically as having a mono ethnic empire and empire populated by Han Chinese, anyone who was not Han Chinese was a stranger, an outsider and was thought of in those terms. From their perspective then they were talking about the people of this Yan region as their brethren and there's interesting examples of this. This is a text, basically it's a funerary epitaph. It comes from a funerary epitaph from a prominent Song minister and he is meeting a Liao official, a Liao diplomat who has come to visit the Song court. This Liao diplomat however is an ethnic Han, is a Han Chinese and in this conversation that may or may not be imagined this envoy is talking to the Song diplomat. He says, I, Liao Liao Fu, so Liao Liao Fu again, he's the Liao diplomat. I am a man from Yan so he is claiming to be from this region of Yan that is populated by Han Chinese. Along with the officials of the Southern court that is the Song Dynasty, we were originally all one family and I think this argument about being all one family is critical because it is indeed suggesting that they share a common descent and so it's not just understood as being a common culture but a common culture that is tied to a common descent. Whether it's the Liao Liao Fu who was thinking this or whether it was the Song, the Song guy who he was talking to who was interpreting what he said in this way or whether this entire conversation was imagined by the author of this epitaph, it's nevertheless important that you have in these Song Chinese texts the articulation of this idea that the people of Yan shared a common descent with the people of Song and so this is how the Song Chinese were interpreting this cultural commonality with that is evident in the material record. However, it is nevertheless worth asking and I will just say a few words about this now to what extent one can nevertheless detect differences in tombs between south of the political border and north of the political border and by and large I find that the differences are more subtle and one can find differences and one can think about the implications of these differences but what they don't do is reflect an entirely different way of conceiving of the afterlife so the much more radical cultural divide it seems to me is between the north China plain and the regions north of the Yan Mountains. One interesting difference has to do with scissors so basically for some reason or another you find scissors in tombs. They seem to have a symbolic significance in Chinese tombs and there's debate on what it actually signified but then they're often found in Qitan tombs basically along with other metal tools so they're part of some kind of tool kit in the Qitan tombs. One interesting pattern is basically you find scissors either painted on murals or actually in relief on the walls in the Song dynasty Chinese tombs in the Liao Chinese tombs that is the tombs Liao tombs south of the Yan Mountains one often finds scissors that are made of ceramic so they're equally non-functional and it seems to me that it goes along with this general idea that lots of the stuff in Chinese tombs works through some sort of virtual reality you don't need the actual functional object for it to do what it needs to do and then finally when you get into the Qitan type tombs that's when you find actual metal scissors that are presumably functional. Another interesting difference between that suggests some sort of impact of the political boundary involves a cremation burial and basically what sort of surprised me ultimately was that by far the most frequent, where one finds a cremation burial most frequently is in the Liao Chinese region, so the region between the political boundary and the cultural boundary. Further north there are cremation burials but they're not the majority they're found occasionally and further south they're actually found very rarely in Song territory. There's good reason to believe so cremation burials in East Asia it is typically seen as an indicator of Buddhism basically. So Buddhists cremate their dead and that's it. But what's interesting is that really everyone in this region was practicing Buddhism to various degrees. We know that Buddhism was widespread. There were Buddhist temples all over Song China and then throughout Liao territory one knows that the Qitan state sponsored these huge Buddhist rituals. There's an inscription for a deceased Qitan princess that says that the name of Buddha was, or Amitabha was uttered something like three million times at the person's funeral so it was a major and with something like 999 monks were involved or something like that it was a huge ritual, a huge Buddhist ritual that was sponsored by the state. And so what this I think demonstrates is not that Buddhism only existed in this region as it would often be read by Chinese archeologists who really see this as a kind of the stereotypic marker of Buddhist practice but in fact that Buddhism was practiced in different ways in these different regions. There were regulations that were intended to discourage cremation in Song China and so these seem to have had an impact. There were no such regulations in Liao territory so cremation burial was common. And then among the ways the references to Buddhism that one finds in Qitan type tombs are of ultimately a different nature. They don't come in the form of cremation and I'm not 100% sure of this interpretation but I found that there's in Qitan type tombs there's a lot of these little chimes that were placed on the sides of coffins and I actually I have a, I'll just go ahead and show this slide now but basically you had a lot of the coffins were made of wood and they were sort of one could argue in the shape of a temple there was a doorway entering there and I think that the chimes are in fact Buddhist symbols they show up in different places within Qitan tombs and the reason I think it's an effective reference to Buddhism is that you have the chimes on the sides of Buddhist pagodas and when you are in this, in the step so this is actually a Liao era, a pagoda, a pagoda that dates to the 11th century and you do hear the chimes from far away so this is a sound that is associated with pagodas that is then one would imagine associated with Buddhism this model pagoda that was found in the crypt underneath a pagoda in the Liao territory it's interesting that one of the most prominent elements of this object are the chimes hanging off the side suggesting again this was something that was clearly associated with pagodas and with Buddhism and so to the extent that these objects are frequently found in Qitan type tombs this may be the way in which Buddhism is expressed in the Liao tombs but again going back to this map it's interesting that one finds a difference both where the political border makes a difference and this cultural border further north makes a difference and one last little distinction that's kind of only semi serious but because there's only some data to suggest this but if you look at whether or not a tomb murals have cats or dogs in them it is interesting that in the Song metropolitan region one only finds cats in the step region one only finds dogs and they tend to be hunting dogs and then there's a little bit of both in this region here but there's quite a few dogs in the Liao controlled part of China but they tend to be these smaller kind of lap dog types which are in fact some of them look kind of like Pekingese not too surprisingly I guess because indeed Pekingese are very common in Beijing today so and Beijing by the way is modern day Beijing is right here so this is the region of Beijing but again here once more is one little bit of evidence of where the political boundary makes a difference one can notice some subtle distinctions between tombs north and south of the political boundary but the cultural boundary is also significant and I think overall the change in the material culture north and south of the cultural boundaries in fact much more striking than is the political boundary I'll stop here and I'm happy to take questions. I love this last one. Dogs and cats. They need to be together. That's a scary one. What is it to Nuki? That is something that is also translated as a raccoon dog and my initial translation was raccoon dog and someone complained that that's so clearly anachronistic to call this animal by a word that only existed for a fruit and animal in the new world so there was much complaining about that translation so I changed it to a Japanese word for this type of animal but it's some kind of an animal about this thing I guess if you want to know what folks are doing. It was a passing that what I really wanted to do was the big chunks of meat and you would point out the cauldrons as being the low side for processing to eat these large chunks of meat. And so I was curious in these beautiful stories that are coming out, do those big chunks, I mean I feel like when you started to talk with there's kind of a natural cultural area going on and I started to think what makes a natural cultural area for both an historian and an archeologist and maybe some of that has to do with where those big chunks of meat are coming to them and how people think about their natural world as being mobilized in these performances of food and identity. So those big chunks of meat, you listed a bunch of stuff like horse, camel, some of it was venison but some of it was a gruel, you know is that potentially something as an archeologist had to say, ah, there's a bunch of labor going into making camel gruel, right? And maybe that has something to do with where those folks who are destined that labor live, right? Their familiarity with the bodies of these animals to be able to reduce that gruel is really different than somebody who couldn't perform that. Yeah, I mean the way I read this is that simply there's a couple of different things going on here. So from the Chinese side, basically eating small, eating with chopsticks is a marker of being civilized and this shows up in texts that the barbarians, they don't eat with chopsticks. So there's that element going on there. And then from the step side, you know it's interesting that they clearly accept this idea that they don't eat with chopsticks but they don't see it presumably in the same way that the Chinese do as, yes, with barbarians we have to get past to the skill of chopsticks and therefore we can't eat with them. Clearly they're not thinking of it in that way but this would be presumably a traditional way of eating. They have much more, on the step, much more meat-based diets. It's basically meat and milk. This is the core of the diet. Even if you go to Mongolia today, you can buy carrots that they're pretty expensive. So distance from that knowledge of bodies and ability to recognize it because that little piece, think about eating with chopsticks. So I think it originates as different diets that they pick up on. They notice that they're eating different kinds of food and it becomes an ethnic marker. It's ethnic markers are then something that is relatively obvious and this is something that they pick up on and it becomes symbolically very significant as a marker of distinction between Chinese and ketones or step people more generally. The fact that you have these cauldrons depicted both on the Chinese paintings and on the ketone paintings, they show up all over the place. So on these depictions which suggest again, this was significant. They're telling you this is a scene of life on the step and this is a key element. And then how they get performed in the banquet suggests once again that the ketones are very aware that this is what distinguishes them from the Chinese. They would never serve a banquet with little pieces of meat. That would be just selling out to the Chinese that would do their thing and make the Chinese have to wait until it gets cut. Yes. Is there a chance that this is going to be used for time meat? Is there a, I mean you say that you're not entirely sure what this is referred to but everything else in the tombs tends to be related to food consumption? Well I would not say that everything is a way to food consumption. That's one element of what one finds. I would say that in the ketone tombs you have these weapons and then horse equipment which I think is clearly not surprising if they are a pastoral nomads. And it's hard to tell whether it's a conscious thing. We're going to put this on our team so people know that we're ketones or if it's more they have a vision of the afterlife where they need what they needed in life, in the afterlife, they need the same things otherwise it'll be a problem. The tools, basically there's just a lot of different tools and a lot of them are like, they're described by archaeologists as quick-cutting tools and I don't know if the archaeologists know what they're actually or if they just see these metal things. But there seems to be a lot of different kinds of equipment, maybe they are used to cut meat that's a very interesting proposal and I think when you think of it as equipment you carry around on your horse as you do your seasonal migrations and so these are essentials in some way or another. On that note, you pointed out the Chinese food, the kuchimol in the northern tombs and you talked about the horse tool orientation. Did the northern tombs not have their own food ways depicted at all in their tombs and the pure ones, the not Chinese ceramic northern tombs? Well, so there would be the biao murals would be, these would be the two ketone tombs and often the tombs of gala territory, the murals were the largest for all the tombs and those tended to be more basic to what one might think of as ketone but they often had plastic, or gilded objects within each other. So food-related objects? Yeah, but there was not actual food, there were often animal sacrificed animals and it's unclear to me what that was. But not an equivalent to what you see with the what you call the Chinese ceramic? Yes, yes, so you don't have the actual food. It isn't a Chinese ceramic, you're not replacing northern food with the kuchimol. Yeah, I mean it's impossible that they would have served that function in those tombs that had that, most of the ketone tombs that didn't have that. I thought that it wasn't the equivalent ketone from the banquet presentation. I just imagine that well, after life, it was going to have to go on and on for themselves and use their tools and the tombs. It was not going to represent it on the way out. So that's a pretty major difference there. Yeah, I'm really excited to hear about this part of your research which you started to talk about and in particular, as a person who's interested in these questions of history and ethnicity in the later imperial period, especially in the non-trucks, I'm also interested in this question of the naturalization of this particular border, the northern border, recently Western borders, right? And the Shisha kingdom and the Kubo, I think, or the Tibetan kingdom to the southwest. And so, you know, particularly in the markers of Buddhism, right, and so it's interesting to me to see that strip where the cremation, so the most prevalent, was really just to the east of the Shisha kingdom, right? And also, I just wanted to mention that those models of the Pugodas and the palaces with the chimes on them remind me a lot of the models of palaces used in Buddhist meditation, right, of which mandalas are the two-dimensional representation and even in the Monksha period, you have the three-dimensional representation of palaces also for Buddhist meditation. I love them so much, like the image that you presented. So, yeah, I just wanted to ask you about how this northern border was construed differently, right? The peoples in the territory of this northern border used to be the western. Yeah, so I guess there's a lot of points I could make about this, you know, in general, the stuff on Buddhism, I did very little with Buddhism, but I didn't notice these zones. I do think this is an interesting area that people who study Buddhism might find some very fruitful material here. I should point out that one of the reasons we don't see anything this way is because my data sample does not include that. I mean, this is basically the western border of this stuff in my database. So, when you mentioned the Shishya kingdom over there, I actually don't know if there was cremation or what not, let me show you. Regarding the, to what extent this was a border that was conceived of as being distinct, my own sense is that it was not necessarily thought of in that way at that time, but what's interesting, what's important about this border is that there were lots of envoys crossing the border in the 11th century, and in fact, I don't have any of the data here because it's really concerned with different talk, but the envoys that they traveled from Song, basically the Song political elite traveled to Liao in huge numbers over the course of the 11th century, such that when I did some statistics, I found that over 50% of the people meeting with the emperor on a daily basis, basically devising state policy had previously traveled to the Liao capital and headed back on this mission. And this means that they're all familiar, there's a general familiarity with this border and there's not the same familiarity with other borders and so this gives this special significance in Song political elite. So if you take into account your inscriptions, I can't remember anything about the scripts or whatever, are they in different scripts or in different languages and how does that evidence from two graph on to the other topic like that? Right, so yeah, so I certainly tried to do things with two epitaphs regarding this project. My first book, I made use of thousands of them, so I was looking for something to do with them. Unfortunately, they're not as prevalent as in the earlier period in the Tang Dynasty and so there's a lot of these tunes don't have epitaphs, which is a problem. But among the ones that do, it's usually the Chinese tunes will have them in Chinese and then there are a certain number of tunes written, the inscriptions written in Qit'an and Qit'an basically is someone who doesn't know Chinese, looks like Chinese and if you do know Chinese, you might first think it looks like Chinese and then you realize, wait, I can't read any of these characters so it looks a lot like Chinese but the language is not entirely deciphered which is a problem. So there are, I don't mean Qit'an but I've read, I've looked at Chinese translations and they tend to be about 10% translated so one knows very little about the content of those inscriptions. I certainly think that the Qit'an script in the historical records, it's clear that the Qit'an script was devised in the middle of the 10th century and it's why we're in the first emperors because he thought we need our own language and our own written language which was clearly significant and that's a kind of establishing the legitimacy of this regime and in fact, successor dynasties that controlled China but that had origins in the North also devised languages, devised scripts, the Mongols devised the script and the Anxius devised the scripts and all made use of the scripts and this was clearly important. Unfortunately, they can't really be read. I tried, it seemed like possibly you could make the argument that inscriptions in Qit'an tend, they're gonna be biographies of the deceased that basically plays as the deceased through being the best possible person but in the Qit'an, it seemed based on the translations that the person was being sort of classified on the basis of dissents in a very clear way of what tribe did they belong to so this is sort of the way in which they were positioned at the very beginning of the inscription whereas in the Chinese one, it will all be started with this person as such and such a place so with more of the emphasis on kind of the defining characteristics based on their place of origin it seems to me that that's significant and one of the arguments I was making in my book is that there's more of a natural way of classifying people according to ethnic terms whereby ethnic one means both culture and dissent assumes to be combined that this is a more natural thing that happens instead whereas in China, there's a tendency to think that culture is partly defined by where you are so even the Qi and the land would sort of define the kind of person you were, so it was rooted in your place and dissent The Great Wall was built a few centuries later could you show us where it runs approximately? Okay, so the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty runs like this and that's also the Great Wall there was a wall there that was getting a severe decay that was had been built with the Northern Qi the Song and Gaskas encountered this wall and they thought it was the Great Wall of the Qing Dynasty that had been built 2,000 years or 1,500 years earlier they were wrong, it was not that wrong it was interesting that they thought it was because for them this was the wall it was the single wall and the wall marked the boundary between China and the region and then it was significant not only were this cultural change but they were counting this wall from their perspective marked the historical boundary of China but it's also interesting to think of why these different regimes built the walls along similar forces and some of it might be historical memory but there's also strategic concerns and further west especially it's striking that the Ming Dynasty Wall as well as an earlier wall that was built even pre-Chin Dynasty roughly tracks the 38-centimeter 15-inch iso-hi-ed which is often used as a way of dividing the region and for agriculture it's possible without extensive irrigation and regions beyond the limits of agriculture it's interesting that Wallis does roughly track that line suggesting that it's kind of a natural and ecological border as well as recognized as such by the villagers Yes To go back to the last image I was really interested in the cats and dogs and smaller dogs and the whales and I was just wondering what do you think the meaning of these symbols were I mean what word is this just sort of coincidental they're sort of part of the background sort of scenery of these murals I mean did they sort of fit into the larger framework of sort of cultural differences that were drawn between so perhaps are perhaps associated in some way with sedentary agricultural life and dogs with pastoral memories or is there some other I think one could easily come up with an argument where hunting dogs are actually useful on a step and so it would be natural that it's less clear why cats are so common in metropolitan towns in this period in my book I sent in notes and I will read it to the readers it's a hard to talk in terms of what this means but it should be noted that in these murals in the Song Dynasty the different walls of the tomb depict rooms, different rooms and so it is part of a domestic scene and often it's part of these murals that have these elements projecting out so you'll have one face that has a wash basin and a clothing rack so that's where you wash clothes or wash your face along with the banquet scene so there's different rooms with different elements and these cats are part of this domestic scene so it seems to me that they would be an animal that would be enjoyed by the deceased after death maybe cats are important when there's a problem with life yeah, it's definitely true that that's the thesis but neither domestic hate but the thing is with peasants' households in rural China there's definitely people like to have their other cats because the cats will eat the rice otherwise they'll eat the grain supplies or even food disasters they'll not have the rice eliminate but since these rooms are mainly of these households I'm not sure if they have the same concerns or not I also wonder if some of these cats will have little ribbons or bells on them which would possibly not be ideal for a catchy night so there's something about these well I'm not sure at least the elite use of cats is the same as the reason most Chinese peasants today would have a cat