Verzeichnis und Motivindex der Han-Darstellungen (review)

This book is a sequel to volumes 1 and 2, whose publication by Otto Harrassowitz began as far back as 1966. The publication of Han representations was interrupted by the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and resumed in 1972. During the twenty-five years between 1972 and 1997 Käte Finsterbusch has collected and recorded more than 2,500 representations of reliefs and wall paintings from Han tombs and shrines published in Chinese periodicals and monographs. Including the contents of volumes 1 and 2 we can now count altogether four thousand descriptions of Han representations. Some of the items included in this catalog are clearly of a later date. Finsterbusch discusses them in her introduction. A short paragraph (p. x) deals with the important problem of authenticity.

The bulk of this work consists of a meticulous description of the contents of representations from sixteen provinces. The section on Shandong is by far the longest (pp. 446-714). This is followed by an extremely detailed index of hundreds of motifs (pp. 715-838) that include, for example, "acrobats," "baldachin, " "bamboo hat," "flute," "moon hare," and "raven." There are also personages such as Min Tzu-ch'ien, K'ung-tzu, and Lao-tzu. A third section is devoted to inscriptions from nine provinces, which are listed and quoted on pages 839-870. Finally, there are three pages listing reliefs, all dating from the Eastern Han (pp. 871-873). On pages 875-884 Finsterbusch has added a list of all the locations where the representations were found. The work ends with a detailed bibliography, mostly of Chinese publications of representations, and a glossary.

All in all, this is an extremely valuable publication for every reader interested in the Han period. It is hoped that Finsterbusch will be able to carry out her stated intention at the end of the preface to publish the representations themselves in the near future. Then we will have for the first time a complete compendium of Han representations that will allow us to assess the wealth of Han art, and we will be able to use this summa of an art historian's life work when teaching courses on the history of the Han. It will then be Käte Finsterbusch's honor to have provided the scholarly world with a tremendously useful tool that will supplement, and indeed perhaps even challenge, our present image of the Han, which is still based for the most part on written sources.