15 - Rethinking Community: The Indic Carvings of Quanzhou

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the late thirteenth century, a Tamil-speaking community in southern China's coastal city of Quanzhou built a temple devoted to the Hindu god Siva. The temple is no longer intact, but over 300 carvings are still within the city, on display in the collection of the local museum, and rebuilt into the walls of the city's main Buddhist temple. The known carvings are distinguishable by their South Indian style, with its closest parallels in thirteenth century temples constructed in the Kaveri Delta Region in Tamil Nadu, and are dispersed across five primary sites in Quanzhou and its surroundings. Almost all are carved with greenish-gray granite, which was widely available in the nearby hills and used frequently in the region's contemporaneous architecture. The remains attest to the presence of a settled South Indian community in southern China during the late thirteenth century and indicate an even longer history of cross-cultural exchange between China and India.

Scholars have charted the movement and motivations of the twelfth to thirteenth century Sino-Indian exchange, analyzing the Indic carvings to show persistent cultural and mercantile relations between the two regions. However, existing scholarship stops short of reading from the carvings a fresh politics of culture and identity, one that challenges today's regnant theories in philosophy, history, and political theory. For, as I will show, the carvings resist a binary understanding of cultural interaction, where bounded, definable cultures or ethnicities “influenced” one another. Indeed, I argue that neither the temple patrons in Quanzhou, nor the city's local artisans, viewed themselves as culturally distinct selves or others when they interacted. Quanzhou's Indic carvings, I argue, index an active translation of ideas and images in built-form.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

What little we know of the community of Siva worshippers in Quanzhou comes directly from the carvings themselves; apart from the material remains of a Siva temple, history has not documented or referenced its creators. The strongest evidence for its construction date is a bilingual inscription found in Quanzhou, written in both Chinese and Tamil on a block of diabase stone, which records the consecration of a Siva temple in 1281.