Identifying Mongol Art in the Yuan dynasty: The Case of Khubilai Khan Hunting

Abstract

The painting Khubilai Khan Hunting (Taipei, National Palace Museum) formerlyattributed to Liu Guandao (fl. late 13th-early 14th century) is a monumental painting produced at the Mongol Yuan-dynasty court in China. Dating to circa 1280, it presents the great Khan and his entourage on a leisurely hunt. Current scholarship regards the painting as a continuum of established Chinese painting themes, yet this is highly problematic. Scholars recently have demonstrated that the northern peoples were often exoticized and represented as culturally inferior in pre-Yuan Chinese paintings. This paper argues the Khubilai Khan Hunting pictorially articulates Mongol identity and the authority of the great khan himself. It subverts Chinese established representations of the northern peoples and of tribute bearers. The content of the painting and its style document the tribute the khan received from his subordinate polities.

The painting itself is a form of tribute that draws upon historical precedents of Chinese imperial portraits and reworks them making use of Mongol cultural referents of authority. To take one example, to my knowledge and with some qualifications, no living or recently living Chinese emperor prior to the Yuan has even been depicted riding a horse and/or wearing fur. Khubulai is majestically posed on a sleek equine sporting a stunningly magnificent ermine robe. Ermine pelts were greatly revered in the Mongol empire and the Yuan government inaugurated an ermine bureau to control access to this form of tribute from the region that is now Korea. Chinese primary documents indicate that ermine enjoyed a long history of royal status in the cultures of the northern border peoples, and this is supported by self-representations of Mongols or proto-Mongols in ermine in tombs and in Il Khanate court imagery. The majesty of the work's vision and its styles serve as testimony to the monarch's exalted status in political and cultural fronts. The content and style of the image formulates a distinctively Mongol art that serves to announce the Great Khan Khubilai as the supreme ruler over China and the Mongol Empire.