Clearing Mountains, Quelling Waters: The Visual Narrative of a Soushan tu Painting and Its Textual Afterlife

The painting considered in this paper demands an approach to Chinese religious and narrative art that grants conceptual primacy to the visual medium rather than the religious or literary texts upon which it supposedly draws. I take as the subject of this paper a hitherto little-studied Ming-era painting titled _Clearing out the Mountain: Demons Fighting with Animals in the Forest_, currently in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum (hereafter the Berkeley scroll). The content of this work associates it with a narrative painting tradition known as _soushan tu_, or “depiction of a search in the mountains.” Departing from text-based approaches that tend to interpret paintings’ visual narrative through comparisons with possible textual counterparts, this paper will show how the painting communicates religio-mythological and political messages through its creative reworking of pre-existing visual tropes. I will also draw on the painting’s colophon, as well as colophons composed for other _soushan tu_ paintings, to demonstrate how the premodern viewers’ disparate interpretations of the visual messages depart from previous scholarly understandings of this genre.

The painting tradition of _soushan tu_ is best introduced with reference to its visual program rather than a textual or religious narrative: usually presented in the long handscroll format, _soushan tu_ derives its name from the central scene of a troop of ferocious-looking heavenly soldiers expelling animal spirits led by a commanding deity and his retinue in a mountainous setting. Although the discrete motifs forming what we call _soushan tu_ paintings already existed in paintings of the Tang dynasty (618–907), the compositionally consistent collective usage of this tradition’s constituent motifs did not emerge until perhaps the mid-tenth century. Court painters and workshop artists continuously produced _soushan tu_ until the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).

An earlier generation of scholarship relates the genesis of this painting tradition in the Tang to textual accounts of Erlang—a so-called “syncretic” deity capable of controlling floods and subduing mountain ghosts. These studies take inspiration from the fact that the term “Erlang’s search in the mountains” appears in a number of Ming-dynasty literary sources. Recent scholarship has called attention to the absence of any text that corresponds exactly to the visual narrative, suggesting that the legend of Erlang appears to have become associated with _soushan tu_ only at a later stage of the tradition’s development. More recently, scholars have presented new readings of the iconography of the commander in the paintings and new interpretations of the relationship between the painting tradition and the corresponding textual-mythological cults of specific deities. The commanding deities featured in different _soushan tu_ paintings have been variously identified as the Buddhist protective deity Vaiśravaṇa, a group of Daoist divinities (_sisheng_), Erlang, and Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war.

While the Berkeley scroll bears a number of common iconographic and pictorial tropes featured in other extant _soushan tu_ paintings, it also bears a number of distinctive features. Most notable are the opening banquet scene, which is absent from most other extant _soushan tu_ paintings; its particular narrative sequence, mediated by the material format of the handscroll; as well as its portrayal of the heavenly soldiers as immoral mobs and of animal spirits as tragic victims. These distinctive features, which might suggest sympathy for the subjugated, invite alternative readings that challenge the political messages usually expected of paintings of this subject.

While the museum gave the Berkeley scroll the title of _Clearing out the Mountain: Demons Fighting with Animals in the Forest_, the painting carries an undated label strip bearing the title _Painting of Yu the Great Taming the Flood_. A concluding colophon makes no mention of _soushan tu_, but discusses instead the legendary ruler Yu, famous for controlling ancient floods. For this reason, the colophon has long been regarded as having been composed for a different, unknown painting, which was later appended to the Berkeley scroll by mistake.

Unlike previous studies on the _soushan tu_ tradition, this paper considers the significance of the colophon for understanding premodern viewers’ attempts to interpret _soushan tu_ paintings in the absence of established textual counterparts to the visual tradition. Based on the analyses of a sizable number of poems and inscriptions composed for _soushan tu_ paintings from the Yuan to Qing dynasties (1271–1911), I suggest that the colophon composed for the Berkeley scroll might not be a “mismatch” or a thematic anomaly, when considered alongside previous colophons on _soushan tu_ in general. Rather, it points to the possible existence of a shared “textual community” facilitated by experiences of viewing and attempts at understanding _soushan tu_ paintings.

My paper begins with a brief review of previous scholarship on _soushan tu_ and then introduces the Berkeley scroll. I proceed to examine two _soushan tu_ paintings that might have served as prototypes of the Berkeley scroll to argue that together, these three paintings form a lineage. Drawing on this group and other workshop paintings, I discuss the role of pattern books in professional workshop practice and explore from a technical perspective how the _soushan tu_ tradition may have developed and been transmitted.  Finally, I examine the colophons of various _soushan tu_ paintings that associate the visual narrative with the legend of Yu the Great, and explore thematic and iconographic commonalities between soushan tu paintings and the paintings depicting legends of Yu the Great.

I suggest that premodern viewers read the _soushan tu_ tradition in relation to environmental anxieties, political discourses of sagely rulership, and the dynamics of the human/non-human divide. Concurrent with mainstream readings that mention other deities such as Erlang—which previous studies have focused on—these Yu-related readings speak to the plurality of interpretations mediated by of the _soushan tu_’s visual cues, challenging the assumed one-on-one correspondence between narrative paintings and religious-literary source(s) and suggesting the ability of visual traditions to independently mediate religiously and politically salient configurations of concepts.