A universe painted in lacquer

Rituals of refinement

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the exhibition's most magnificent pieces appear in a section devoted to daily makeup rituals.

These compartmentalized, silver-mounted lacquer containers are lavishly adorned with gold and silver foil, a decorative choice that Zuo links to the alchemical practices that particularly captivated Han emperors and vassal kings. Excavations of tombs in the surrounding region over the past decades have yielded a wealth of lacquerware for the exhibition.

Each compartment held a smaller, equally ornate container for cosmetics and personal accessories, including bronze mirrors, face powder and rouge. Inside one horse-hoof-shaped lacquer container, archaeologists found wooden combs of the same shape, their upper, toothless portions painted with the ubiquitous cloud-and-qi motif.

Interestingly, one lacquer container from a male burial held a bronze mirror, several tortoiseshell hairpins and a bronze comb-cleaning brush. Cosmetic practices during the Han Dynasty were not confined to women: contemporary texts record that male palace attendants wore face powder, while archaeological finds suggest that men also used grooming implements.

Elsewhere, this masculine taste for adornment is reflected in a wooden lacquered sword scabbard designed to be worn with jade sword fittings, and a much smaller knife in a lacquered sheath. The latter was not intended for self-defense, but for scraping away errors on the bamboo slips used for writing during the Han Dynasty.

Known as a shudao, or writing knife, it belonged to a world in which practical objects could also convey refinement. Lacquered inkstone boxes and writing tables served similarly cultivated pursuits, while a gentleman's bearing was governed by conventions of decorum and propriety.

In the Han Dynasty, people commonly sat on mats laid directly on the floor, knees bent beneath them, buttocks resting on their heels, and backs held upright. Maintaining this composed posture for long periods could be physically demanding. To ease the strain, sitters could use a small stand placed in front of them for support, along with a lower, stool-like support between the feet. Its curved upper surface allowed the sitter to rest the buttocks, with the legs positioned on either side of the base.

Both types of stand, made of wood and finished in lacquer, are on view in the Nanjing exhibition. In practice, both would have been concealed beneath the voluminous robes worn at the time.

Music and mortality

Music was also central to ritual propriety and cultivated life during the Han Dynasty. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the artistry of ancient zither-making through delicate wooden bridges that supported the strings and regulated their pitch. Their lacquer paintings depict animals, while the instrument's measured rhythms find a visual echo in the sinuous lines of Han lacquerware. Like a string composition, Han lacquerware is at once restrained and sumptuous. Its black-and-red palette holds a quiet intensity, while its churning lines rise and fall like musical phrases, gathering force in waves of crescendo.

Another musical motif appears on a Han Dynasty wenming — a house-shaped lacquered funerary cover for the deceased's head, featured in the exhibition. Among the myriad figures and creatures that populate its painted surface, a tiny winged immortal plays a pair of pipes, almost lost amid the fantastical throng borne through a cosmic landscape alive with the flowing yunqi (cloud-and-qi) motifs.

A closer look reveals winged immortals riding in chariots drawn by four deer, as well as others engaged in yishe, an ancient form of hunting in which birds were captured alive using arrows attached to cords. The cords ran back to spools, allowing hunters to retrieve them after shooting. Widespread during the Han Dynasty, the practice is depicted here in scenes of winged hunters, each holding a bow in one hand and a spool in the other, with a bird ensnared at the end of the cord.

The real and imagined worlds converged once more in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist text traditionally attributed to Zhuang Zhou (c. 369-286 BC), whose ancestors some scholars believe came from the ancient state of Chu. The text questions the boundaries between self and other, dream and waking, and different states of existence, including life and death.

Zhuang Zhou, who once served as an official overseeing a lacquer grove, filled his writings with fantastical imaginings to explore humanity's place within nature and to contemplate life and death as phases in a larger process of change.

A founding figure of philosophical Taoism, Zhuang Zhou exerted an enduring influence. More than three centuries after his death, Zhang Heng (78-139), one of the Han Dynasty's most celebrated polymaths, revisited the philosopher's vision of life and death in his Rhapsody on a Skull (Dulou Fu).

The work recounts an encounter with a talking skull that refuses Zhang Heng's offer of resurrection, declaring that in death it has "united with the primordial vitality of the cosmos ... with heaven and earth my bed and bedding" — a powerful evocation of an understanding of existence reflected in almost every form of Han Dynasty art, lacquer included.

Perhaps the most revealing moment comes when Zhang Heng asks the skull about its identity, wondering whether in life it had been "a person of exceptional wisdom or one of utter folly". The skull's reply is startling: "My surname is Zhuang, and my given name Zhou."

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn