**2. Literary and Visual Representations of Queen Mother**

The Han dynasty witnessed the rise of belief in the Queen Mother and also witnessed the flourishing of the rhapsody. Unfortunately, many Han rhapsodies failed to survive,

**Citation:** Wang, Xiaoyang, and Shixiao Wang. 2022. On the Differences between Han Rhapsodies and Han Paintings in Their Portrayal of the Queen Mother of the West and Their Religious Significance. *Religions* 13: 327. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13040327

Academic Editors: Xiaohuan Zhao and Thomas Michael

Received: 24 November 2021 Accepted: 2 April 2022 Published: 6 April 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

which is also the case with other genres of Han art and literature. As recorded in the *Quan Hanfu* 全漢賦 (complete Han rhapsodies), one hundred-odd Han rhapsodies are extant entirely in a readable form (Fei et al. 1993), but a close reading of this complete collection shows surprisingly that only four of them mention the Queen Mother, describing her as a goddess of longevity and immortality. A survey of the archaeological excavation reports published in China in the past seventy years shows that 195 of them are concerned with paintings on Han tomb walls, stones, and bricks. A further examination of the 195 reports shows that fifty-two of them report findings of stone carvings of the Queen Mother. These data strongly sugges<sup>t</sup> that the goddess did not attract so much attention from Han *fu* poets and their audiences as from Han artists, or more exactly, Han artisans and their patrons, although her cult spread throughout the country during the Han period (Yoshikawa 2011, p. 1120). This phenomenon does not escape scholarly attention. In her book on *Picturing Heaven in Early China*, for example, Lillian Lan-Ying Tseng (2011, p. 359) notes, "The belief in ascending to Heaven and the cult of the Mother Queen of the West are rarely recorded in the extant Han texts; it is mostly through images that we gain understanding".

A question arises as to why the Queen Mother is much less represented in Han rhapsodies than in Han pictorial stones. There is no definite answer, but if the question itself is analyzed, a plausible explanation for this phenomenon might be that there existed two Queen Mothers in the Han dynasty, one worshipped as a goddess of longevity and immortality by people from the upper class, for whom and by whom the rhapsody was composed, and the other worshipped by the ordinary people as a seemingly omnipotent deity with divine power over both the immortal world and the mortal world, for whom and by whom the stone carvings were etched. The reasons are as follows.

### **3. Han Rhapsodies and Han Paintings That Feature the Queen Mother**

The Queen Mother was a major deity in the Han pantheon, who features in both rhapsodies and paintings, the two most important art forms of the time. After combing through specific works, the authors of this article have found that there are several differences between the depictions of the Queen Mother in rhapsodies and paintings. First of all, there is a huge contrast in quantity. It should be noted that in the spread of her cult in the Han dynasty, the King Father of the East (Dongwanggong 東王公, hereafter the King Father) appears as her consort. Thus, the following quantitative statistics of the Queen Mother also include mentions about the King Father.
