Ferocious Glutton Symbol and Sunray Pattern
2 min readFerocious Glutton Symbol
Ferocious Glutton( Taotie) is an image on very ancient bronze, jade and stone carvings or as Chinese call it Taotie. Taotie is a fiction animal very gluttonous. Taotie has very complicated contents, as a Taotie image usually is the combination of many fiction and real animals together. However since 2000 B C after the Shang&Zhou Dynasties, people stopped using this image on utensils and other things in the Han people areas, but it survives in the remote mountainous regions.
Sunray Pattern
Many other books concluded that this is the drum patter. Probably that is because it looks like the face of a drum. However I am inclined to call it the Sunray Pattern or Mangwen as this conclusion conforms more to our field findings. Sunray pattern is widely adopted by all the ethnic groups from ancient China down to now in folklore, for worship. It is the symbol of Sun. Great amount of sunray patterns with the Miao communities show that the Miaos share the same origin with other ethnic groups in China.
Miao stories tell that one tribe of the Miao ancestors in their fighting and immigration, chose the direction of the sunset for their love of the sun, and moved westward on and on Finally they were stopped by endless sierras of the mountains and settled down in the place where now i tis Guizhou province in West China. This is a story unable to verify. However what is true is the worship they have of the sun by the Miaos and their forefathers which is fully revealed in those omnipresent sunray patterns.
