The Frontier Imaginary in the Song Dynasty (960-1279): Revisiting Cai Yan's 'Barbarian Captivity' and Return

This dissertation examines the early twelfth century handscroll the Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute in light of changing conceptions of gender and ethnicity in pre-modern China. Focusing on the dynamic relationship between text and image in this early masterpiece of narrative painting, it examines its textual and stylistic precursors as well as its artistic innovations. The Eighteen Songs illustrates the "barbarian captivity" of Lady Cai Yan, a legend that originated in the late second century and that epitomized the fascination and anxiety that people in China felt about their northern frontier. Arguing against the prevailing sinological interpretation that the illustrations of Cai Yan's twelve-year captivity indicate a Chinese sense of cultural superiority and ethnic chauvinism, this dissertation demonstrates that the painting presents a highly constructed and polemical narrative that belies notions of rigid boundaries between culture and savagery. Chapter One makes the case for the historical importance of the northern frontier in the Chinese historical imagination. It examines the pictorial and poetic conventions in which this nomadic frontier was defined. Chapter Two traces the textual tradition of Cai Yan's captivity, exploring how the story was transformed through the centuries. In particular, it contrasts different portrayals of her tearful parting from her "barbarian" children and her return to her Chinese home, and it argues that recent interpretations of the story overemphasize the importance of the latter. Chapter Three examines the interplay of text and image in the handscroll, investigating how the visual material inflected and reformulated the multivalent story. Specifically, it shows how the visual rhetoric of the work, which emphasizes Cai Yan's separation from her children as opposed to her return to China, reveals a more sympathetic view of her captors and thus an anti-xenophobic sentiment running through the work. Finally, Chapter Four offers a re-dating of the painting based on the artistic and political concerns that it reveals, and it suggests a new historical context for the handscroll's creation and reception.