Risha Lee
PhD Candidate
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University
Constructing Community: A Shiva Temple in Medieval Southern China
Friday, April 16, 4-6 pm
CWAC 156
Abstract
13th century Quanzhou, a coastal city in Fujian province, might not appear the most obvious location for a permanent community of merchants from Tamil Nadu, south India. Even with modern ships, the roughly 4500 nautical miles that separate Tamil Nadu and Quanzhou are not traversed easily. Over 300 carvings, including a bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscription, however, found in the city and surrounding regions, attest that a group of Tamil merchants built a medium sized, south Indian style temple, devoted to the Hindu god Shiva in 1281. Though scattered references record Indian populations in southern China from the 8th century onwards, these carvings constitute the sole “text” for the Shiva temple’s existence and provide a fascinating micro-history of this community.
In this chapter from my dissertation, I examine the temple carvings, analyzing their form, and reconstructing the temple to show how the presence of multiple communities and active cross-cultural exchange facilitated its construction. Though past studies have remarked on the carvings’ Indic iconography and style, none have reconstructed the temple or its historical context. In this essay, I offer both, as well as a surprisingly short lifespan for the temple—built in 1281, it was destroyed little over a century later, in the late 14th century. In developing a chronology for the events that resulted in the temple’s creation and demise, I hope to shed light on this forgotten community, as well as the still poorly understood figure of the Tamil merchant.
