TOKENS OF IMMORTALITY IN HAN GRAVES * (Review article)

(with an appendix by MARC KALINOWSKI) Few scholars today possess the talent to capture the interest of a general audience for topics in ancient Chinese history of thought. A remarkably large share of such exceptional studies has been produc-ed by the British tradition of scholarship. Arthur Waley, Joseph Needham and Michael Loewe, among others, have written books in a beautiful style intelligible and delectable to read for anyone seriously interested in China, while endowing these books with so many new data and insights that they became milestones or even classics of scholarship for the specialist. After Crisis and Conflict in Han China, an excellent study on the intellectual and institutional history of the middle Han period (104 BC to AD 9), Michael Loewe turned to the investigation of the mythology and religion of the Han. In Ways to Paradise, as the dust-jacket informs us, he "assesses a wealth of new archeological evidence in an attempt to uncover the attitudes of the pre-Buddhist Chinese to matters relating to death and the hereafter". This overall concern unites the three specialized studies on Han art and iconography that compose the book: 1 ° the recently discovered painting on the silk funeral banner from Ma-wang tui dated around 168 BC; 2 the bronze mirrors of the so-called TLV pattern that came into fashion around the beginning of the Chris-tian era and reflect the rich cosmological symbolism characteristic of Han thought and 3 the representations of the Queen Mother of the West which testify to growing beliefs in personified cosmic powers, from perhaps a century later. With his extensive knowledge of recent archeological discoveries (see Loewe, 1976 an