Taotie (饕餮): The Mask on Shang Bronzes, and Where the Name Came From

Start with the object

In the Freer Gallery in Washington there is a small bronze box on four feet, with a roof-shaped lid and a knob on top. It is a fangyi, a wine container, cast in the early Anyang period of the late Shang, around 1200 BCE. It is twenty-three centimeters tall, which is to say you could pick it up in one hand. The bronze has gone green, and the recessed lines of its decoration are packed with red, which the museum thinks may be cinnabar.

On each of its four sides is a face.

Look at it properly, the way you would look at any object that is trying to tell you something. The first thing you notice is that it is perfectly symmetrical, and not approximately so: a raised ridge runs down the center of each panel, and the left half is the exact mirror of the right. The second thing is the eyes, two of them, round and bulging and lifted well clear of the surface, which is the only part of the design your brain will accept as anatomy. Above them a pair of horns curl outward in thick hooked bands. Below them, bands that read as a brow and a snout.

And then it stops. There is no lower jaw. No chin, no mouth, no teeth. The face has a top half and simply no bottom half.

Every remaining square millimeter is filled with leiwen, thunder pattern, tiny squared spirals packed together so tightly that there is not one patch of plain metal anywhere. And along the borders above and below the face, the museum's own catalog notes, there are dragons in profile, one on each side of the ridges, facing inward. Which is the detail that gives the whole thing away: those dragons are drawn in exactly the same vocabulary of hooks and spirals as the face is. Look at the mask one way and it is a monster. Look at it another way and it comes apart into two dragons in profile, nose to nose.

That is the taotie. Or rather, that is the thing we call the taotie, which turns out not to be quite the same statement.

The name is nine hundred years younger than the face

Here is the fact that reorganizes everything else on this page.

Chinese founders were casting this design onto vessels by 1500 BCE and were still doing it into the early Zhou. The earliest surviving text that calls the design a taotie was written in 239 BCE.

Set those next to each other. The Freer fangyi was already about nine centuries old when somebody first wrote down a name for what was on it. That is a longer gap than the one between us and the Norman conquest.

The text is the Lüshi Chunqiu, and it gives the matter one sentence:

The Zhou tripods bear the taotie. It has a head and no body. It eats a man, and before he is swallowed the harm has reached its own person. This is a way of speaking about retribution.

Read that carefully and you can see what is happening. The author is looking at a bronze and explaining it. He notices the thing anyone notices, that the face has no lower half, and he turns it into a moral: here is a creature so greedy it consumed itself, cast onto a ritual vessel as a warning against appetite. It is a good reading. It is also a reading, arrived at by a man in the third century BCE staring at an antique, and there is no evidence whatsoever that it is what the people who made the antique had in mind.

There is a nice irony in the provenance. The Lüshi Chunqiu was compiled under Lü Buwei, the merchant who became chancellor of Qin and regent to the boy who would become the First Emperor. Lü had three thousand retainers and put the best of them to work on an encyclopedia of everything worth knowing. When it was finished he hung it up at the city gate of Xianyang and offered a thousand pieces of gold to anyone who could improve a single character of it. Nobody took the money. Chinese still uses the phrase, one word a thousand gold, for writing of unimprovable quality.

So the sentence that every article about the taotie ultimately rests on, including this one, comes from the book nobody dared correct. It is still a guess.

Before that, it was an insult

Go back further and the word turns up in an even less monstrous context.

Its first appearance is in the Zuo Tradition, under the eighteenth year of Duke Wen, in a passage about four notorious characters of high antiquity whom the sage-king Shun banished to the four frontiers to fend off goblins. Three of them, Hundun, Qiongqi and Taowu, are the sort of names you would expect. The fourth is described like this:

The Jinyun clan had a worthless son, greedy for food and drink, grasping after goods and bribes, encroaching and extravagant, never to be filled or satisfied, hoarding and piling up wealth without knowing any limit. The people of the world ranked him with the other three monsters and called him Taotie.

That is not a description of an animal. It is a character assassination. The man is a glutton and a grafter, and Taotie is what the neighbors called him, roughly the way English might call someone a pig. The word arrives in the record as an insult aimed at a human being, with no bronze vessel anywhere in the vicinity.

Somewhere between that passage and the Lüshi Chunqiu, somebody looked at the jawless face on an old ritual pot, thought of the man who could never be filled, and put the two together. It was an inspired connection. There is no reason to think it was a correct one.

What we actually know, and what we are guessing

This is where the honest version has to be laid out, because it is more interesting than the tidy version.

What is solid. The design exists in enormous quantity, is datable, and evolves in traceable ways across the Shang and into the Zhou. The vessels it decorates were made for offerings of food and drink to ancestors, which is not in dispute. And it is frontal, symmetrical, two-eyed and jawless with great consistency across centuries and workshops.

What is not solid. Everything about what it meant. The sinologist Sarah Allan has put the problem as plainly as it can be put: there is no particular reason to assume the term taotie was even known during the Shang. We have a design from one civilization and a vocabulary from another one nine hundred years downstream, and we have been reading the first through the second for two thousand years because it is the only vocabulary anyone left us.

And there is a genuinely deflationary case. It runs through Max Loehr and his student Robert Bagley, and the argument they were having was with Bernhard Karlgren.

Karlgren's camp held that bronze decoration developed the way the writing system did, from realistic animals gradually abstracted into pattern. The attraction of that story, Bagley points out, is that it lets you work backwards: if the motifs evolved out of real animals, then whatever those animals meant is what the motifs mean, and the decoration becomes a code you can crack. Loehr thought the sequence ran the other way, and more importantly he thought the code was not there. What is implicit in his work, in Bagley's reading of it, is that aesthetic matters have to be treated as independent of everything else: the internal logic of design and formal development, on its own, accounts for how these bronzes changed, with no appeal to external significance required at all.

Bagley's analogy is Palestrina, who was employed by the church and whose music certainly served a religious function, but whose job was not to convey theology, since the theology was already in the fixed text. His job was to make it magnificent. That, Bagley says, is how Loehr saw the Shang bronze-casters: not required to encode anything.

That last part is easy to underrate, so it is worth spelling out. Shang bronzes were made by the piece-mold method: a clay model, a clay mold built around it and then cut away in sections, the sections carved, fired, reassembled around a core, and filled with metal. The decoration was therefore carved into flat mold segments before anything was cast. Which means the symmetry is not a stylistic choice so much as an artifact of working in mirrored sections. The flanges sit where the mold pieces met. The leiwen ground exists because a carved-in-clay technique wants dense filler to make raised shapes read. On this account, you do not need a myth to explain the face. You need a workshop.

And the case against that. These are ritual vessels. They were expensive beyond ordinary comprehension, they were buried with kings, and they existed to feed the dead. It takes a certain determination to insist that the only thing decorating them means nothing. Most scholars still read the imagery inside its religious setting even while conceding that nobody can say what it meant.

Both positions are held by serious people and the argument is live. This page is not going to settle it, and any page that tells you it is settled is selling something.

The glutton, and the monsters on the wall

The word did not stay in the museum.

In modern Chinese a taotie is simply a glutton, a person of enormous and undignified appetite, and the term has warmed up considerably over the centuries. A taotie feast is a spread so lavish it is faintly ridiculous. A taoke, a taotie-guest, is a foodie, and it is a compliment. The Bronze Age face has ended up in restaurant reviews.

And then there is the wall. In 2016 Zhang Yimou made The Great Wall, his first film in English, on a budget of $150 million, in which an army of alien creatures called Tao Tei arrives on a meteorite, breeds in a hive under a mountain, and assaults the Great Wall every sixty years, with Matt Damon shooting arrows at them. It scored 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 42 on Metacritic.

It is also, by a wide margin, the reason most English speakers have encountered the word. So, for the record: the meteorite, the hive, the sixty-year cycle, the queen, and the connection to the wall are all screenplay. The early texts give you a jawless face on a wine vessel and a greedy man in Shandong, and that is the entire inheritance.

Say it tāo tiè, two syllables, roughly tow-tyeh: the first rhyming with cow and held high and flat, the second dropping sharply, like yeah with a t on the front.

The masks are still there, on several thousand surviving vessels in museums all over the world, being symmetrical and eyeless-jawed and entirely uncommunicative. They were doing that for nine hundred years before anyone gave them a name, and they have never once confirmed it.

If the design intrigues you more than the monster does, the profile dragons in those same borders are the other half of the vocabulary, and they have a page of their own. And if the gap between a thing and its name is what interests you, Pangu is the same problem at the other end of the scale: China's account of the creation of the universe, which nobody wrote down until the third century CE. The court that cast these vessels is also the court that scratched the oracle bones behind most of the character histories in our symbol pages, which is to say: same century, same workshops, same people, two completely different kinds of evidence.