Does a feather in your hat a barbarian make?

Abstract

Fenghuangshan M1, a tomb located in the Ordos Desert, is one of several Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) tombs excavated in Inner Mongolia whose murals remain well-preserved. Across its four walls male and female figures appear in a number of scenes common in Han mortuary art, but they wear hairstyles and headgear that scholars have associated with the Xiongnu and the Qiang, two non-Han groups mentioned in textual sources. This chapter takes a different approach and, instead, highlights the diversity of headgear and hairstyles in this tomb, some of which can be securely placed in the larger corpus of Han male and female headgear and hairstyles, and others that cannot. Rather than argue for a one-to-one correlation with groups mentioned in historical sources, this chapter argues the depiction of headgear and hairstyles in these murals are better understood as expressions of the contested and complicated nature of political, cultural, and social identity along the Han northern frontier.