A Cultural History Of Shawl In Middle Age Of China

In recent years, a large number of murals in tombs of Sui and Tang period have beendiscovered, in which most of the maidens wear shawl(pi-bo,帔帛). Inspired by these murals,the present treatise tries to trace the source and history of prevalence of this kind of costume.There was no shawl in Chinese secular costume before Buddhism was introduced intoChina. In India, it had appeared on the sculptures of Yaksa already before Buddhism cameinto being. The same costume on the murals of Sui-Tang tombs could be traced to an Indianorigin, rather than an Iranian one, which most scholars has been believing.The craft of Buddhist image-making imitates ancient India's art pattern to a great extant,and along with the spread of Buddhism, the shawl was introduced into Central Asia and China.Most figures in the primeval Buddhism images were nude, and the shawl on their bodies wasthe most remarkable clothe, but with the Sinicization of the Buddhism images, the shawl fellinto a secondary rank in the whole scene. The Pei/Pi(帔)worn by Daoist masters inheritedancient Chinese clothe type in fact, which did not plagiarize Kasdya of Buddhist monks, andwas not affected by Iranian culture either. The Zoroastrianist art found in China, though Iranianin origin, absorbed many Buddhist artistic factors, among which the shawl is an example.Thanks to the popularity of Buddhism in China, in the time of North and South Dynasties(南北朝) , secular women began to imitate the shawl formerly worn by Boddhisattvas andheavenly musicians and dancers in Buddhist images only. Down to Tang dynasty, the shawlbecame a very popular dress in women of all social classes, especially the high-ranking ones.From the Song dynasty on, the shawl (called Xia-pei [霞帔]) was absorbed into the Chao-fu (朝服) system, and became a kind of grande toilette(礼服), monopolized by the empress and titledwomen(命妇).