Branches and Bones: The Transformative Matter of Coral in Ming Dynasty China

Grasskamp, Anna

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96379-2_5

Branches and Bones: The Transformative Matter of Coral in Ming Dynasty China

Anna Grasskamp^4,5

Chapter
First Online: 28 November 2018

720 Accesses
1 Citations

Part of the book series: Europe's Asian Centuries ((EAC))

Abstract

Through international trade, coral fragments from the Mediterranean Sea arrived in Ming dynasty China. There, they were represented in paintings as a significant constituent of pan-Asian Buddhist iconographies. Against the backdrop of coral’s meanings in early modern Europe and its trade links to Asia, this chapter investigates red coral in Ming dynasty China with a focus on Buddhist imagery, particularly through Korean paintings and Indian mythology. Entangled in a web of transcultural meanings, coral was perceived as having a unique ability to transform. It was viewed as an object “in between”: between global and local spaces, between resembling tree branches and the blood-covered bones of self-sacrifice, between foreign commodity and sacred offering.

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Notes

1.
Zhang Dai 張岱, Tao’an Mengyi 陶庵夢憶[Reminiscences in Dreams of Tao’an] (ca. 1665), ed. Tu Youxiang 屠友祥 (Shanghai 1996), juan 2, section 4, 45, trans. and annotated in B. Teboul-Wang, Souvenirs reves de Tao’an, traduit du chinois, presente et annote par Brigitte Teboul-Wang (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 41.
2.
Marcia Pointon, “Something Rich and Strange,” in idem, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 107–144.
3.
Olivier Raveux, “Du corail de Méditerranée pour l’Asie. Les ventes du marchand marseillais François Garnier à Smyrne vers 1680,” in La mer en partage. Sociétés littorales et économies maritimes (XVI^e–XIX^esiècle), ed. Xavier Daumalin, Daniel Faget, Olivier Raveux (Aix-en-Provence: PUP, 2016), 343–59; Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (London: Leicester University Press, 1978); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
4.
Elisabeth Scheicher, “Korallen in fürstlichen Kunstkammern des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Weltkunst 52 (1982): 3447–50; Anna Grasskamp, “Metamorphose in Rot: Die Inszenierung von Korallenfragmenten in Kunstkammern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Tierstudien 4 (2013): 13–23; Marlise Rijks, “‘Unusual Excrescences of Nature’: Collected Coral and the Study of Petrified Luxury in Early Modern Antwerp,” Dutch Crossing 41, no. 2 (2017): 1–29; Alberta Bedocchi, Documenti di collezionismo genovese fra XVI e XVIII secolo: I numismatici della lista Goltzius e la collezione Viale: cultura e business di una famiglia di corallieri nel mercato europeo delle anticaglie e del lusso (Rome: Scienze e lettere editore commerciale, 2012).
5.
Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 136.
6.
For a recent discussion of the early modern European perception of coral, see Shannon Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body: A Natural History of Coral and the Post-Tragic Ecology of The Tempest,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2014): 115–142, 116–8.
7.
Rijks, “‘Unusual Excrescences of Nature’”; Grasskamp, “Metamorphose in Rot.”
8.
Pamela Smith, “Collecting Nature and Art,” in Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara Hannawalt and Lisa Kiser (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 115–136, 126; Michael Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (1999): 215–35. Grasskamp, “Metamorphose in Rot,” 13–16.
9.
Rijks, “‘Unusual Excrescences of Nature,’”15–16; Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body,” 116–8.
10.
Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body,” 123.
11.
Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 368.
12.
Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body,” 123.
13.
Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body,” 139.
14.
Men seylt van malaca door de strate van Sinchapoere / na Sina. In Sina woont seere goet volck / ende is een landt seer rijck van Gout / Edel ghesteente / alderhande syde / Perlen / Perlemoer / Camfer / Quicsiluer / Rhabarbar / Goutdraet / Muscus. Dirck Gerritsz, “bericht” [report], in F. van Raphelengien, Tresoor der Zeevaert van Lucas Jansz Waghenaer met verschillende aanhangsels, Leiden, 1592, cited from Jan W. Ijzerman, Dirck Gerritsz Pomp, alias Dirck Gerritsz China, de eerste Nederlander die China en Japan bezocht (1544–1604) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1915), 18–22, on 20.
15.
K.W.J.M. Bossaers, ed., Dirck Gerritsz Pomp alias Dirck China, Symposiumbundel (Vereniging Oud Enkhuizen: Enkhuizen, 2002).
16.
Paarlen en velerlei kostelijke gesteenten als robijnen en andere … zeer goedkoop. Anonymous authors with comments by Dirck Gerritsz, “Manuscript voorbereiding Eerste Schipvaart,” Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam, fol. 201–207, cited from Vibeke Roeper, “Waren uit het koninkrijk van China’ Twee vragenlijsten met commentaar van Dirck Gerritsz,” in Bossaers, ed. Dirck Gerritsz Pomp, 25–28.
17.
Koraal van verschillende soorten, vooral grote takken en langwerpig koraal. Ibid., 28.
18.
De peerlen comen van Ormus ende Ceylon ende andere wegen; worden gevischt van duyckers 20 ofte 30 vademen diep onder water, ende groeyen in de oesters op den gront van de zee. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Copie van eenen brief, die een soon scrijft … (Copy of a letter that a son writes …), dated to 1584 or 1585, Rijksarchief. Aanwinsten 1882, 212 B, 136–8, cited from Ijzerman, Dirck Gerritsz Pomp, 12.
19.
Tansen Sen, “Diplomacy, Trade and the Quest for the Buddha’s Tooth: The Yongle Emperor and Ming China’s South Asian Frontier,” in Ming: Courts and Contacts, ed. Craig Clunas, Jessica Harrison-Hall, Luk Yu-ping (London: The British Museum, 2016), 26–36, on 33.
20.
Huang Xingzeng黃省曾, Xiyang chaogong dianlu西洋朝貢典錄 [Records of Tributes from the Western Ocean Countries], 1520. Translated in Klaus Michael Sonnendecker, “Huang Xingzeng: Verzeichnis der Akteneinträge zu Audienzen und Tributen vom Westlichen Meer (Xiyang chaogong dianlu) [黃省曾, 西洋朝貢典錄, 1520 n. Chr.],” PhD Dissertation Freie Universität Berlin (2005): 196, footnote 15; 114, 129, 150.
21.
Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade. The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2003), 210, referencing Liu Xinru, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, AD 1–600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
22.
Ibid., 209.
23.
Rob Linrothe, Paradise and Plumage: Chinese Connections in Tibetan Arhat Painting (New York/Chicago: Tang co-published with the Rubin Museum of Art and Serlina Publications, 2004), 68.
24.
Ibid., 198.
25.
Ibid., 215.
26.
Ma Huan, Ying-yai sheng-lan. The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, 1433, trans. and ed. J.V.G. Mills (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society Extra Series 42, 1970), 140–1; modified from Mills’ translation and cited from Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 234.
27.
Song Yingxing, Tiangong Kaiwu天工開物 [The Exploitation of the Works of Nature], 1637; translated and annotated by E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun in T’ien-kung K’ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century (University Park and London: The University of Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966). For a book-length study of the treatise, see Dagmar Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things. Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
28.
Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295–309, on 295.
29.
Ibid., 299.
30.
Ibid., 295.
31.
On Tang dynasty and earlier descriptions of the origins of pearls, see Edward Schafer, The Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 242–5, on 243. On the absorption of moonlight by pearls as understood by Song, also see Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, 70–71.
32.
Translation quoted after A Manual of Chinese Quotations Being a Translation of the ch`êng yü kào (成語考) with the Chinese Text, Notes, Explanations and an Index for Easy Reference, trans. J.H. Stewart Lockhart (Hong Kong: Kelly & Wash, 1893), 278.
33.
Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 300.
34.
Ibid., 298.
35.
Han to Song dynasty sources on pearl acquisition in that region are discussed in Edward Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 72, no. 4 (1952): 155–68.
36.
Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295.
37.
Ibid., 298.
38.
Pippa Lacey, “The Coral Network: The Trade of Red Coral to the Qing Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Routledge, 2015), 81–102, on 94.
39.
Lacey, “The Coral Network,” 98.
40.
Examples include a German letter from 1757 which refers to the Jesuit Johann Koffler’s (1711–85) desire to have coral (among other items) transported to Asia, see Ignatius Bonschaub to Maria Theresia, Augsburg 17.01.1757, transcribed in Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1600–1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2006), 306.
41.
Cynthia Viallé, “‘To Capture their Favour‘: On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” in Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, ed. Michael North and Thomas Kaufmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 291–321.
42.
Huang Xingzeng, Xiyang chaogong dianlu, 1520. Translated in Sonnendecker, “Huang Xingzeng.”
43.
Anna Grasskamp, “框架自然:從清宮中的三件珊瑚藝品論起 [Framing Nature: Three Coral Objects from the Qing Imperial Collections in Context],” Gugong Wenwu Yuekan [The National Palace Museum Monthly of Chinese Art] 399 (2016): 108–117. Anna Grasskamp, “Chapter Four: Mapping Foreign Nature: Coral Specimens on Display in Late Ming Visual and Material Culture,” in Cultivated Curiosities: A Comparative Study of Chinese Artifacts in European Kunstkammern and European Objects in Chinese Elite Collections (PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2013), 146–91.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Roderich Ptak, “Notes on the Word ‘Shanhu’ and Chinese Coral Imports from Maritime Asia, c. 1250–1600,” Archipel 39 (1990): 65–80.
46.
Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 300.
47.
Craig Clunas, “Precious Stones and Ming Culture, 1400–1450,” in Ming: Courts and Contacts, 236–44.
48.
Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 215.
49.
Karl Debreczeny, “Sino-Tibetan Artistic Synthesis in Ming Dynasty Temples at the Core and Periphery,” The Tibet Journal 28 1/2 (2003): 50. On the paintings also see Yang Boxian, Fahaisi bihua 法海寺壁画 [The Fahai Temple frescoes] (Beijing: Zhongguo minzu sheying chubanshe, 2001).
50.
For a brief summary of the story of the filial parrot, see Wilt Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2008), 33–4.
51.
See, for example, Unidentified artist, Amithaba Triad, thirteenth to fourteenth century, Korea, The Cleveland Museum of Art, 6I.135 and its Korean-Chinese elements as discussed by Yang Siliang in Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, ed. Marsha Haufler (Weidner), exhibition catalogue (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 229–32.
52.
Unidentified artist, Wasser-und-Mond-Kwanyim, fourteenth century, Korea, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln, inventory number A 09,59; Sŏ Ku-bang, Yoryu Kannon, 1323, Korea, Sen-oku Hakuko Kan, Kyōto.
53.
Linrothe, Paradise and Plumage, 68.
54.
Unidentified artist, Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara, first half of the fourteenth century, Korea, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 14.76.6; Unidentified artist, Yoryu Kannon, early fourteenth century(?), Korea, temple collections of the Daitoku-ji, Kyōto. Smith, Judith, with Chung Yang-mo, Ahn Hwi-joon, Yi Song-mi, Kim Lena, Kim Hongnam, Pak Youngsook, and Jonathan W. Best, ed., Arts of Korea (New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1998), 166.
55.
Schafer, The Peaches of Samarkand, 246. Schafer translates the entire paragraph from Tang Shu, 221b, 4155c.
56.
Unidentified artist, Five Luohan with Attendants Crossing the Ocean, ca. 1610. Hanging scroll, ink, and color on silk, 146.9 x 81.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, accession no. F1911.275. A high-resolution version of the image is freely available online, at https://www.freersackler.si.edu/object/F1911.275/ (accessed June 2018).
57.
Wu Meifeng吴美凤, “Mingdai gongting huihua shi wai yizhang: cong Cisheng huangtaihou de huizao tanqi 明代宮廷繪畫史外一章:從慈圣皇太后的繪造談起 [A Note on Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Court Painting History – Beginning with the ‘Painted and Made’ Inscription by the Empress Dowager Cisheng (1546–1614)],” Gugong Xuekan 2 (2013): 267–310, 277.
58.
Wu, “Mingdai gongting huihua”: 277.
59.
Meir Shahar, “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination: Nezha, Nalakuūbara, and Kṛṣṇa,” in India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion and Thought, ed. Meir Shahar and John Kieschnick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 22–45, on 28.
60.
Shahar, “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination,” 31.
61.
Quoted from Meir Shahar’s summary of the tale in ibid., 23.
62.
An early-twentieth-century example which features a conspicuous red ribbon is provided by Nezha Conquering the Seas, Republic of China (1912–1949), Kaifeng, Henan province, woodcut, 23 x 27 cm, University Museum & Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, ed. Popular Prints from China and Epinal, France, exhibition catalogue (Hong Kong: University Museum & Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, 2007), 57. A simple Google image search of the terms “Nezha anime” leads to numerous contemporary anime images by different authors that feature the child-god with red ribbon and gold ring.
63.
Meir Shahar, Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2015), 97–9.
64.
Sanjiao yuanliu shengdi fozu sou shen daquan 三教源流聖帝佛祖搜神大全. Ming edition. Photographic reprint in vol. 3 of Wang Qiugui 王秋桂 and Li Fengmao 李豐楙, eds., Zhongguo minjian xinyang ziliao huibian 中國民間信仰資料彙編. Taibei: Xuesheng shuju, 1988. Reproduced in Shahar, Oedipal God, 101.
65.
Wu, “Mingdai gongting huihua”: 277.
66.
Unknown artist, Guanyin on Potalaka, Ming dynasty, hanging scroll, ink, and color on silk, 130.5 x 55.5 cm, Private collection, Kamakura; Ding Yunpeng, Five Forms of Guanyin, Ming dynasty, between 1579–80, handscroll, painting, ink, color, and gold on paper, 28 x 134 cm, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 50–22. Reproduced in Haufler (Weidner), ed. Latter Days of the Law, plate 24 and 26, catalogue number 49 discussed by Marsha Haufler (Weidner) in ibid., 360–62, the motif of catalogue number 48 is discussed in Yü Chün-fang, “Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara,” in Latter Days of the Law, ed. Haufler (Weidner), 151–82, on 161.
67.
Coral branches appear as kezhi 柯枝 in the Cochin tribute chapter and as zhike 枝柯 in the Lambri section, Huang, Xiyang chaogong dianlu, translated in Sonnendecker, “Huang Xingzeng,” 324.
68.
Yü, “Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara,” 161.
69.
Yü, “Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara,” 161. For a scene in which Miaoshan either cuts off her hands and eyes herself or has them cut off in versions of 1164 and 1551 see Glen Dudbridge, The Legend of Miaoshan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139. For various interpretations of this deed, see Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety, 21–3.
70.
Shahar, “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination,” 24.
71.
Ibid., 21.
72.
Gail Hinich Sutherland, The Disguises of the Demon: The Development of the Yaksa in Hinduism and Buddhism (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 27.
73.
Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety, 38.
74.
Shahar, Oedipal God, 141–2.
75.
On Vaisravana see Shahar, “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination,” 27–8.
76.
On Manibhadra see ibid., 30–31.
77.
Cited from Dudbridge’s summary of Shancai’s story as it appears in the Xi you ji (Journey to the West), 1570, in Dudbridge, The Legend of Miaoshan, 63.
78.
John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 174–5.
79.
Ibid., 175.
80.
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 242–3.
81.
Marsha Haufler (Weidner), “Images of the Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva and the Wanli Empress Dowager,” Chungguksa yongu (The Journal of Chinese Historical Researches) 35 (2005): 245–78, on 249.
82.
Peter Sturman, “Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong,” Ars Orientalis 20 (1990): 33–68, on 36.
83.
Sturman, “Cranes above Kaifeng,” 34.
84.
On the motif of two phoenixes and the crown, see Luk Yu-ping, “The Empresses’ Dragon Crown: Establishing Symbols of Imperial Authority in the Early Ming,” in Ming: Courts and Contacts, 68–76.
85.
Roderich Ptak, Birds and Beasts in Chinese Texts and Trade: Lectures Related to South China and the Overseas World (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 27. Also see Aida Yuen Wong, “Kingfisher Blue in Ming Arts: Status Symbol, Material Invention, and Intercultural Connections,” in Colour Histories: Science, Art, and Technology in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Magdalena Bushart and Friedrich Steinle (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 145–57.
86.
Haufler (Weidner), “Images of the Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva and the Wanli Empress Dowager,” 245–78, on 249.
87.
(Attributed to) Wu Wei, Zhong Kui the Demon Queller with Five Bats, 1501–1700. Hanging scroll, ink, and colors on silk, mount 230 x 114.5 cm, painting 160 x 111.5 cm, along roller 124 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, accession no. EA2000.119.
88.
Hope B. Werness, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2003), 29.
89.
Ma Huan, Ying-yai sheng-lan, 90, cited after Clunas, “Precious Stones and Ming Culture,” 239.
90.
Yuan Ke, Dragons and Dynasties: An Introduction to Chinese Mythology (London: Penguin Books, 1991, 1993), 181. Edward Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u,” 155–168, on 156.
91.
Lockhart, trans., A Manual of Chinese quotations, 280.
92.
Mentioned in Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u,” 156.
93.
Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u,” 159.
94.
Christine Guth, “Towards a Global History of Shagreen,” in The Global Lives of Things, 62–80.
95.
Kelley, “The King’s Coral Body,” 139.
96.
For a discussion of the parallels between King Lear and the tale of Miaoshan, see Dudbridge, The Legend of Miaoshan, 89–95.
97.
John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth. The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute of America, 1985).
98.
Schafer, The Peaches of Samarkand, 248.

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Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Anna Grasskamp
Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe at Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Anna Grasskamp

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Anna Grasskamp
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History Department, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Michael Bycroft
History of Art, Science and Technology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Sven Dupré

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The author would like to thank the editors of this volume for their feedback and gratefully acknowledges the financial and institutional support for the writing of this chapter provided by Hong Kong Baptist University, the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at Heidelberg University, and the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University.

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Grasskamp, A. (2019). Branches and Bones: The Transformative Matter of Coral in Ming Dynasty China. In: Bycroft, M., Dupré, S. (eds) Gems in the Early Modern World. Europe's Asian Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96379-2_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96379-2_5
Published: 28 November 2018
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