A Preliminary Study On Han-Jin Figurines Of Hu People In The Reaches Of Yangtze River

Hu people in the Han-Jin period are ancient nationalities in the west and north of China, the Western Regions, and India as while. During this period, by the increasing of economical and cultural exchanges between the West and China, a great deal of Hu people swarmed into the Han region. In the tombs of Eastern Han appeared a lot of Figurines of Hu people, which acted as a carrier of foreign culture. As one kind of new phenomenon in this period, what kind of cultural information does it provide for us?Based on the fully arrangement of the Hu figurines, according to their shapes and functions, the paper assorts them into four categories and describes them respectively: figurines of musicians, dancers and acrobats; human-shaped lamps; attendants' figurines; clergies' figurines. The author points out that the distribution of figurines is changing with the time. In Eastern Han period they centralize in the upper reaches of Yangtze River, while in Three Kingdom and Two Jin periods, the lower reaches of Yangtze River. According to the cultural information it contains, through analyzing figurines of musicians.dancers and acrobats, the paper argues that in one hand they mirror the tomb owners' lives before their deaths and the social lives, in another hand they embody their ideals of lives of other world, and reflect the peoples funeral concepts. At the same time, the paper makes a brief analysis on human-shaped lamps, concluding that some human-shaped lamps are probably related with the witchery of burning the lizard' s fat, which is recorded in the book Huainan fang bi shu.According to the problem that how Hu people migrated to the reaches of Yangtze River, the paper analyzes two possible routes neglected by scholars. One is the route connecting Central Plain, Northern China and the reaches of Yangtze River; another is the Lingling-Guiyang route, connecting the Jiao-Guang region and the reaches of Yangtze River. The author argued that during this period some Hu people arrived in the reaches of Yangtze River through the former route but others the latter.Furthermore, the paper also discusses the composition of these Hu people in this region, and besides the figurines of Hu people mentioned above, there are a great deal of businessmen and soldiers.