aesthetic pursuits as on one occasion when Li Bo was ordered by the emperor
to sing his own poetry while Pei Min, a renowned martial artist and general,
accompanied him with a long sword dance. Pei Min generally used a sword
on the battlefield, but his skill with the long sword went beyond dancing to
combat as well. He could also dance with a sword, in one instance cutting
four arrows out of the air while on horseback.
While Pei Minfits the earlier pattern of a martial artist whose skill with
a weapon was aesthetically pleasing when presented in a long sword dance,
and Li Bo may be seen as an example of a still partly martial variant of this
in a man of letters, during the Tang an entirely new form of long sword
dance arose that was purely aesthetic. This new form was a long sword
dance performed by a woman at court for entertainment. The performer
was not presumed to be a warrior, or someone who expected to engage in
combat, but simply a woman whose long sword dance was beautiful.
Previously, weapon dances likely derived from actual patterns of techniques
used in martial arts training and were performed by and for warriors in an
explicitly martial context. The Hundred Events of the Han dynasty grew
out of martial arts training, martial ceremonies, and competitions. In the
Tang dynasty wefirst see mention of a martial display by a nonwarrior in a
nonmartial context.
Women in Martial Arts Entertainment
This clear separation between the demonstration of a combat skill abstracted
from its violent context, and the purely aesthetic coupling of beautiful
women and elegant martial arts was a new development. By the Tang
dynasty, as we have seen, the martial arts had a long tradition of perform-
ance as entertainments, including the use of weapon dances. The reason for
the shift to a nonmartial woman performing the sword dance is indicated
obliquely by Du Fu, another great Tang poet, when he referred to the dance
of the Gongsun family as“Long sword of Huntuo [Persia].”During the
Tang, a new kind of dance connected for some reason to Persia began to
be performed. This dance was apparently performed by naked, or possibly
scantily clad, women. It may also have been simply regarded as lascivious
because of the body movements involved. Indeed, one Tang emperor
(Xuanzong) prohibited its performance as harmful to customs. His prohib-
ition failed, it seems, and the dancing continued.
Persian dancing and long sword dancing combined into a form where
a fully clothed woman performed a long sword dance. The woman most
famously known for her performances was Lady Gongsun (ca. 700 – 56 ),
104 The Sui and Tang Dynasties