Iconic Ancestors: Wire Mesh, Metal Masks, and Kitan Image Worship

It is now well known that tombs of certain Kitan elites contained individualized metal face masks, wire mesh, and sometimes metal shoes or soles, all used to dress the deceased. The discovery of splendid and very well-preserved examples, such as those covering the remains of the Princess of Chen 陳國公主 (1001–1018) and her husband, Xiao Shaoju 蕭紹矩 (Fig. 1), has led to a variety of interpretations of this peculiar burial practice. Nevertheless, our understanding of it remains perfunctory at best; textual sources are scarce and comparative archaeological evidence has been compromised by looters, who have disturbed an overwhelming number of Kitan tombs. Scholars only agree that the practice was specific to the Kitans and popular during the second half of the Liao dynasty. Most have therefore come to treat the metal paraphernalia as markers of Kitan identity.¹

At the core of this conclusion is a singular textual record written around 1138 by a certain Wen Weijian 文惟簡:²

The mourning and burial rites of the northerners are by no means all the same. The local Chinese gather the mortal remains and bury them. Their mourning and funerary rites are the same as those in the Central Plains. The Jurchen place their dead in wooden coffins and bury them in the mountains and forests, but do not build a mound or plant trees. The Kitans have a particularly curious practice. When a wealthy member of the nobility dies, the abdomen [of the corpse] is cut open and the stomach and intestines are removed. The body is then washed and preserved with fragrant herbs, salt, and alum, and sewn up with five-colored thread. Then pointy reeds are stuck into the skin so that fat and blood can drain out completely. Gold or silver is used for a face mask and copper wire to wrap hands and feet. When Yelü Deguang died, this method was used. Thus when [we read that] people at the time called this “imperial dried meat,” it is because this was indeed so.³

A late-Liao or early-Jin scholar from Beijing who had somehow found his way into Song territory, Wen Weijian reports on the Kitan funerary custom with the authority of a local observer. But his credentials as a reporter should not blind us to the fact that his account, Veritable Facts from the Caitiffs’ Courts, is heavily sino-centric. Although Wen must have been well aware that the Kitan burial tradition in many respects resembled that of the Chinese, he chose instead to single out the bizarre and barbarian for his Southern Song readers. By limiting his descriptions to embalming techniques reminiscent of hunters gutting and salting their prey, he presented the Kitan elite as the stereotypical cultural “other,” pastoral nomads whose customs stood in stark contrast to those of the sedentary, agrarian Chinese.

Modern scholarship has not been entirely immune to Wen’s rhetoric, for it, too, has tended to read the mask and wire mesh burial practice as an expression of nomadic identity, with several authors linking it to shamanistic beliefs and steppe burial traditions.⁴ But given the Kitan elite’s intense engagement

Figure 1.

Detail view of the remains of the Princess of Chen (right) and her husband, Xiao Shaoju, in situ, 1986.

[Source: Liao Chenguo gongzhu mu (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1993), color plate 3.]

with all forms of contemporaneous Chinese culture, we should expect that this peculiar burial practice did not grow out of the Kitans’ nomadic heritage alone and that it may reflect aspects of a Kitan identity that had little to do with nomadic life. The present paper consequently proposes to highlight Chinese cultural practices that can be related to the Kitan use of masks and wire mesh. A particularly relevant context in this regard is the Kitan elite ancestral cult and its associated veneration of icons.⁵ Not only can we find close parallels between Tang, Song, and Kitan notions of image worship, but there are also striking conceptual similarities between enshrined portrait icons and the bodies...