Fuxi and Nuwa, Recovered from a Silk Road Tomb

Fuxi and Nuwa's intertwined serpent tails, familiar from later temple carving, survive in one of their oldest and best preserved forms far from any temple, on silk paintings recovered from Tang dynasty burials at the Astana cemetery near Turfan, on the Silk Road in what is now Xinjiang. The paintings, made for burial rather than public devotion, show the pair with human torsos and coiled, entwined lower bodies, compass and set square in hand, the sun and moon and a scatter of stars filling the space above them, and multiple examples have been recovered from different tombs at the site, suggesting the motif was a standard funerary furnishing there rather than a single artist's invention. Their presence so far from the traditional heartlands of Chinese myth, carried along a trade route where Chinese, Turkic and other populations lived side by side, shows the pair functioning as portable cosmological guarantors of order for the dead, credentials of civilization's basic patterns thought worth taking into the tomb regardless of how distant the burial ground lay from the Yellow River plains where their legend was first told. The Astana paintings remain a principal source for reconstructing how the Fuxi-Nuwa image looked before later, more standardized temple and print versions fixed its familiar form.