122R024PX0135P9papercut of Xing Tian, the beheaded warrior of ancient Chinese mythology, made by Qiao Xiaoguang.

In the Spring-Autum Chronical of Zuo Qiuming 左传 an obscure entry dated around 640BC says: Lord Zang of Zheng liked to collect snipe feather hats; Duke Wen was offended, and ordered to have him assassinated. 郑子臧好聚鹬冠，郑文公恶之，使盗杀之 Why should a mere sartorial preference produce such a drastic outcome? We have to go back  another 3000 years to find the answer.

Archaeologists found in China two neolithical centres of jade worship: the Hongshan sites in northern china yielded a relatively small number of objects, but with highly imaginative designs and polished execution (considering the primitive tools available at the time) that challenged our modern, patronizing view about the ancient state of mind; the southern Liangzhu sites are even more impressive: there are great numbers of them spread over much of middle eastern china seaboard, and they are of a large scale, with each tomb situated on a soil platform that would have required thousands of people to pile up, and many yielding hundreds of jade items per tomb. While the majority of these lacked the artistic refinement of Hongshan jade, the more complex objects pose their own challenges to our understanding of the ancient people.

The picture of a two-faced demon, with numerous variations, appears frequently on Liangzhu jade objects, mostly on the ritual “cong”,

but occasionally also on axes and discs. A cong usually have the demon face on each corner, but one large cong has demon faces in the corners as well as in the middle of each side, with a pair of bird signs separating the frontal and corner faces.

Judging by the Liangzhu tombs and the complex ritualistic thinking presented by the variety and elaboration of jade objects, the Liangzhu people had a highly organized social system, which somehow left no trace in historical records. We have no idea what happened to the Liangzhu people, other than that around 2000BC they disappeared from their original locations, but some subsequent sites showing Liangzhu influence were found in the surrounding regions such as Shandong, Guangdong and Taiwan.  In any case, it appears that one thousand years after the Liangzhu people’s disappearance, when writing was invented, the Chinese world had already lost all knowledge of them. No signs of them were found in any historical records or legends, and when archaeologists discovered the tombs, the jade objects caused astonishment and incomprehension all around.

The orignal design of the Liangzhu monster face has a demon wearing a large feather hat, with a second face on his chest, the eyes being the breasts and the mouth being the navel (which links to the ancent legend of 刑天, whose head was chopped off by Yellow Emperor but he continued fighting using breasts as eyes – the legend probably arose from a burial ritual for headless warriors killed in battle) – the upper face is the main one and the lower one subsidiary

Obviously, the large feathered hat is of considerable ritualistic significance. In various later folk tales, there were divinities descending from heaven wearing a feather crown, which reminds us of the “descent of the phoenix” ceromony of the Shun (pre-Shang) era: after the playing of the nine divine tunes, the leader of the Shun tribe would appear on stage to receive the submission of his subjects, and presumably his phoenix costume would include a feather crown.

This explains why Duke Wen took offence at Lord Zang’s collection of feather hats: it signified interest in the royalty status associaed with the objects- though the Liangzhu traditions were unknown in Spring-Autumn times, certain vague ideas lingered.

In any case, post-Liangzhu, when the symbol spread to other tribes, its meaning did not always get correctly understood, such that the lower face was thought to be the main one and the upper face was part of the feather hat, producing new designs


then human faces got replaces by other animals, e.g., bird above/human head below, a natural move for a bird worshipping trible

and man wearing tall hat changed to bird wearing high hat

man wearing high hat leading to blade like jade designs


next came bird with two human heads, expanding to a circular structure that will become the toothed disc

a Xia dynasty plate with turquoise pieces fitted on copper plate also has the double face – by the age of metal, the orginal two faced Liangzhu demon has gone “abstract”