Research On Cultural Features Of Archery In The Wei Jin Northern And Southern Dynasty

Archery originated from the needs of ancient people of hunting and self-defense.Along with the process of evolving, it has developed into Chinese traditional sport with cultural and ritual colors. Meanwhile, the stage of development of archery can serve as criteria to judge how well the social culture has processed in a certain period of time.In Wei-jin Southern and Northern dynasties, power in China was distributed, and wars happened frequently. To satisfy the need of warfare, people highly valued the development and inheritance of archery culture. Except the depressing political atmosphere, Wei-jin Southern and Northern dynasties are viewed as an era of wisdom and passion, in which there was sufficient room for the development and archery culture, and the culture itself carried certain period-specific characteristics.The author of this thesis has mainly adopted the methods of referring to historic documents and ancient Chinese, summarizing and qualitative analysis to carry out the research on family educating, women who practiced archery, archery for military purpose, archery for entertainment purpose and the communication of archery cultures between the north and the south, thus coming to the cultural characteristics and historic reasons of the development of archery culture in Wei-jin Southern and Northern dynasties.In this study, the author made some conclusions. Firstly, family education is the driving force of archery during entire Jin Dynasty. This is due to the continual war and great fluidity of population so that the state owned school couldn’t last long. On the other hand, the development of landlord economy led to the appearance of nobles. Secondly, women archery appeared during this period. Although there is a record of women archery before Entire Jin Dynasty, this is not real woman’s archery. The real woman’s archery was started from Entire Jin Dynasty. This is not only a common social phenomenon, but also had been recognized by public. Thirdly, archery culture during Entire Jin Dynasty has geographical differences and diversion of development. During 400 years history of Entire Jin Dynasty, northern had more wars than southern.Therefore archery in the north is for military and archery in the south is for entertainment. Finally, migration promoted the exchange of archery culture. People brought their social atmosphere, mode of production and tradition to the new region. People also learn local culture from local people, this led to the military archery and entertainment archery culture exchange on both governmental and nongovernmental level.