A Sky with No Frontier: Figure, Schema, and Movement in the Astral Culture of China and Inner Asia

The tenth to thirteenth centuries in what is now China witnessed the heyday of traditional Chinese astronomy, the transmission of new astral concepts and forms from afar, and the rise of influential astral deity cults. This talk examines the visual and material dimensions of this “astral turn” in transregional and transcultural perspective. We travel between the central Chinese plains, the northern steppe, and the northwestern desert, from the last days of the great Tang dynasty (618-907) to the multicentered age of the Song (960-1279) and its non-Han rivals, the Khitan Liao (907-1125) and Tangut Xixia (1038-1227).

We examine how, in an era of very palpable territorial limits, the astral bodies exercised a striking freedom of movement, crossig cultures, social registers, and religions in their wanderings across the sky. The fluidity was enabled, I argue by a productive tension between figurative representation and underlying abstract schemas. This reflects, in turn, the longstanding dynamic encounter between classical Chinese thought and the Indian religion of Buddhism. Identifying a shared schematic language across a broad range of materials, we will explore how astral culture’s worldmaking function fueled the rise of vernacular cosmologies and, ultimately, new imperial visions.