China has seen countless pictorial works of agricultural production in its long history of land cultivation. These works appeared in a wide range of forms and content and concretely manifested traditional Chinese agricultural civilization in a tangible manner. In recent years, the rise of pictorial historiography has grabbed the attention of scholars in the fields of historiography, folklore, and art, drawing them to agricultural images from ancient China.

Farming images

Various forms were used to portray ancient farming scenes and agricultural production activities in different periods, ranging from etchings on pre-Qin (before 221 BCE) bronzeware, stone reliefs from the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220), household Lunar New Year paintings, and even tomb murals. These works can be roughly grouped into five categories: stone reliefs and tomb murals, systematic farming and weaving diagrams, agricultural books, books for daily life, and custom images, mainly depicting ploughing, harrowing, sowing, grain processing, mulberry leaf picking, and other agricultural activities, said Wang Jiahua, a professor from the Advanced Institute for Confucian Studies at Shandong University.

In Wang’s view, ancient Chinese farming images have academic significance as they impart rich information about agricultural production, artistic creation, people’s lives, and ideological concepts. Examining farming images helps identify to what degree agriculture shapes and influences traditional Chinese civilization and society. 

According to Hui Fuping, a professor at Nanjing Agricultural University, agricultural images have already attracted academic attention, in terms of collecting and compiling Han agricultural relief stones, and ancient farming and weaving pictures. Research results show many scholars of ancient Chinese history and agricultural history have taken agricultural images as historical materials and extracted pictorial content to analyze the levels of agricultural development and agricultural technologies in different eras.

Despite this, such research has not yet fully uncovered the value of farming images, since it neglected the insight that farming images themselves were products of a unique environment where ancient Chinese society emphasized agriculture and encouraged people to engage in agricultural production, thus overlooking specific historical “fields” and “contexts” in which these images existed and were used. The rich information they carry presents itself not only in pictorial content, but also in the “historical reality” displayed in all aspects. 

Research approaches

The emergence of image historiography in recent years has widened research prospects for farming images, beyond conventionally categorizing them as merely auxiliary or supplemental to written materials, Wang noted. On the basis of determining the historical development and artistic nature of farming images, scholars should place each image in the specific historical context of its creation and application, shedding light on its creative background, the artist’s intention and motivation, dissemination, usage, function, significance, and detailing ideological concepts, cultural codes, and symbolic connotations behind it.

When upholding historiography as the basic disciplinary positioning, scholars need to draw on theories, methods, and knowledge from other disciplines to conduct a panoramic and multi-dimensional in-depth analysis of agricultural images, suggested Lian Chunhai, an associate research fellow from the Institute of Fine Arts at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. 

The folk roots of agricultural images require scholars to leave their offices for fieldwork, said Zhang Shishan, a professor from the Advanced Institute for Confucian Studies at Shandong University. It is necessary to return to historical sites through fieldwork and interviews to deeply understand the creative backgrounds of agricultural images. For example, investigating Lunar New Year paintings’ production areas such as Weifang in Shandong Province and Yangliuqing in Tianjin Municipality, should be put on the agenda when discussing the creation, dissemination, and application of agricultural images in the form of Lunar New Year paintings. Specifically, we can interview veteran artisans making Lunar New Year pictures and locals on the creation process, sales, usage, and their perceptions of these pictures. In doing so, we can discover new ways to supplement and complement related documents.

Database

According to Zhang Congjun, a professor at Shandong University of Art and Design, except for a small number of Han stone reliefs, tomb murals, and systematic farming and weaving pictures that have been compiled and published, the majority of agricultural images have yet to be systematically collected and compiled, including those found in farming books, books about daily life, Lunar New Year pictures and other custom items, paintings for export, and newly discovered Han stone reliefs.

With the in-depth application of information technology in social science research, digital humanities technology has gradually been leveraged in the field of farming images, Wang continued. It is necessary to classify each image and its related literature according to categories, times, names, media, discovery places, collection places, content, and compilers after comprehensively and systematically gathering a collection. Specifically, we can arrange metadata processing with all farming images and related text data, through image classification, clustering, and the construction of image retrieval and semantic annotation technology platforms, aiming to build a mature, comprehensive, and practical ancient Chinese farming image database.