Warriors of Ancient Ba Tribe
Guo Zehong (Postgraduate, Sculpture Department, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts):
According to relevant data, the Ba people were an ethnic group with a martial spirit. So I made a warrior鈥檚 image. His attire, willow-leaf-shaped sword and conical hair bun were modeled after patterns carved on unearthed bronzes.
In historical records, the Ba people were known as 鈥淪trong Tigers鈥 From unearthed 鈥淏a and Shu pictographs鈥 we can find the Ba people鈥檚 hairstyle which is relevant to that nickname. The mysterious image of the conical hair bun is inseparable from the tiger鈥檚 image.
Guo Zehong:
I consulted many visual data, including unearthed skulls of Ba people.The main source of imagery comes from the Tujia people and modern inhabitants in the Three Gorges area. It even embraces the images of ethnic minorities in the south.
The rattan coat of mail, the conical hair bun, the long bronze dagger-axe and the short willow-leaf-shaped sword remind us of a vague image of the Ba people. It seems that a group of fighters with weapons in their hands are coming back to life in our world of the 21st century. The state of Ba disappeared over 2,000 years ago. With the fragments of bronze, we are now reconstructing a picture of their life.
The Ba people established the powerful state of Ba with the bronze weapons they made themselves and their natural instinct of valour and vigour. It was a big state established on the basis of armed force and deaths.
On June 20, 2002, we came to the exhibition room of the China Martial Arts Administration Centre in Beijing. Here we saw the willow-leaf-shaped bronze sword of the Ba style donated by Hu Yaxin. It bore verdigris, but the decorative pattern remained gorgeous. It seemed that its story had just begun.
Many years have gone, but the Pengxi River is still flowing quietly into the Yangtze River. What happened to Hu Yaxin 40 years ago was probably predestined. He not only read the mysterious pattern and pictograph on the bronze sword. We believe that he came face to face with his ancestors at that moment.
Today the villagers of Lijiaba are still living in their pastoral songs and tales. Below the soil are stories of events that occurred thousands of years ago. Where have the Ba people in the age-old stories gone? Where did their earliest stories begin?
