The Lady of Dai

Lady of Dai after exhumation. China Daily.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/25/content_368631.htm

Depiction of the Lady in her
funeral name banner.
( Hung, 1992)

The main purpose of this blog post is to prove that the Lady of Dai’s aristocratic ascribed social status was, as in life, showcased in her final resting place quite clearly by the abundance and quality of her grave goods. This post will begin by talking about the Lady of Dai’s origins, details about her excavation, and lastly examine her grave goods and how they served to contribute to her aristocratic status.

First of all, the concept of ascribed social status will be defined, to help clarify the aforementioned and how it pertains to this case study of the Lady of Dai. What is ascribed status? It is a way to describe a level of social status someone is born with. In the case of the Lady of Dai, she was born a noblewoman, an aristocrat, and became perceived even more so in her marriage to Li Cang, the marquis of Dai (Bonn-Muller, 2009).

The process that led to the excavation of the Lady of Dai’s tomb, later known as Mawangdui Tomb number one (Hung, 1992), in 1972 began in late 1971.Workers who were digging to make a shelter into the side of a hill called Mawangdui noticed by chance during a cigarette break that the air coming from the hill burst into flames; which in this case was caused by the decomposing organic material from the recently exposed tomb releasing highly flammable gases to the air. The workers reported the incident to local officials, who then sent a team of archaeologists to investigate, and beginning in early 1972; after digging down through 50 feet of the hill's natural red clay, they discovered the second-century B.C. tomb of the Lady of Dai (Bonn-Muller, 2009).

The Lady of Dai, whose name was Hsin-chiu lived in the Chinese city of Ch’ang-sha which is located in the central Yangtze valley during the Han Dynasty period (Buck, 1975). The Lady died in 163 B.C (Bonn-Muller, 2009) when she was around fifty years old, and thanks to the remarkable preservation of her corpse, which gives her the fame of being one of the world’s most well preserved mummies, an autopsy could be performed and many details from her life 2100 years ago could be learned; The Lady measured 154 centimetres in height and weighed 34.3 kilograms as she was quite well nourished during her lifetime ( a hallmark of her aristocratic status) she had a high amount of subcutaneous fat (Buck, 1975) , enough to be classified as obese, which led to her death by a heart attack caused by clogged arteries (Buck, 1975) . The autopsy examinations also served to offer a wealth of other information about the Lady’s medical history; Among other things, the Lady had Type-A blood, as a young woman had given birth to children, there was evidence throughout her body of a myriad of bacterial or parasitic infections during her lifetime, and she would have stood and walked with a bent posture due to issues with her spine (Buck, 1975).

The final resting place of the Lady’s was a tomb located to the east of her husband’s, as custom in that time dictated (Buck, 1975). To describe the tomb spatially, it was an oblong pit measuring 19.5 metres north to south and I7.5 metres east to west, and it extended for 20 metres from the top of the covering mound to the bottom (Buck, 1975); the crypt space, where the Lady was placed, and part of the tomb-shaft lie within the original Mawangdui hill, and the tomb was oriented towards the north and arranged so that the Lady would lie with her head to the north (Buck, 1975).

The tomb chamber contained within the crypt, which has inner and outer chambers was built from large cypress planks; in the inner chamber which acted as a casket where the four coffins were located, fitting into one another, which housed the Lady’s remains (Buck, 1975). The outer compartments between the tomb-chamber and the coffin enclosure were divided into four sections and contain most of the tomb-furnishings (Buck, 1975).

Image of the Lady's crypt (Hung, 1992)

Inside the inner chamber of the tomb, the Lady rested in her four elaborately decorated coffins which were nested one into the other. The four coffins in the centre of the tomb-chamber were all beautifully built and decorated. The outermost coffin was black lacquer outside and red inside, with no other decorations. The third coffin had a black-painted background covered with cloud patterns, within which fifty-seven different mythological scenes were interspersed. The second coffin was decorated with a red background overlaid with a mix of colours with all of the sides bearing elaborate scenes. The last and innermost coffin in which the Lady was finally situated was decorated with an overlay of satin stitch embroidery; the top and sides were further embellished with feathers (Buck, 1975

Banquet Scene on silk painting from Lady of Dai's tomb. Hunan Provincial Museum. 

The details of the Lady’s elaborate tomb will be discussed next. Within the chambers of the Lady’s crypt the cypress compartments were overfilled with exquisite items, more than 1,000 in all, surrounding the four nested coffins at the center (Bonn-Muller, 2009). The main idea being to create a comfortable, underground home for the immortal Lady (Hung, 1992) that would accompany her to the afterlife and keep her comfortable; this was accomplished with a wealth of goods, including some lacquer ware, embroidered silk, musical instruments, and writings on the importance of exercise and maintaining good health. Examples of the aforementioned items can be seen by following the link , among these artifacts included: red and black lacquer drinking vessels, wine containers, and boxes for storing cosmetics; silk items such as : an elaborately embroidered golden silk gown, dainty fingerless mitts, a silk sachet filled with various spices, flowers, and fragrant reeds ; lastly, there also were wooden figurines of servants mourning, and statuettes of musicians playing wind and string instruments (Bonn-Muller, 2009).


In conclusion, the elaborate decoration and material goods in the Lady’s tomb serve to ascertain her high social status. The effort organized intro creating the Lady’s tomb represented an estimated million man-hours in production (Silbergeld, 1982) which would have been unattainable for someone not within the nobility, and the style of this decoration fits contemporary descriptions of the ways in which the coffins of the nobility were prepared (Buck, 1975). The variety and quality of the grave goods show that Lady Dai lived a luxurious life, which she enjoyed very much and wanted to maintain in the afterlife (Bonn-Muller, 2009).

Sabrina Perez Nino