Chasing the Halcyon Light – Human-Kingfisher Relations in Eastern Han-Dynasty China (CE 25–220) and Their Material, Sociocultural and Ecological Articulations

This article takes a fresh look at human-kingfisher relations in Eastern Han-dynasty China (CE 25–220). It argues that the confined appearance of kingfisher figurines in graves excavated in the southwest of the modern-day People’s Republic of China reflects the structural differences in human-kingfisher interactions between the centre(s) of the Han empire and its peripheries. By re-visiting the archaeology of the figurines and placing them into the wider cultural and ecological context, it is shown that distinct sociocultural transformations such as urbanisation processes and infrastructural projects profoundly changed the exposure and interactional dynamics between humans and kingfishers in the northern parts of the realm. This situation contrasted sharply with human-kingfisher interfaces in the southwest, where relatively ‘untamed’ environments harbouring a great number and diversity of kingfishers provided more favourable conditions for encountering them. I propose that this framework, in turn, fostered conceptualizations of kingfishers in which the birds came to encapsulate an experience fundamentally opposed to the type of human preponderance showcased in the core areas. By discussing a set of local practices and beliefs that might have further promoted this view, I suggest that they served as catalysts for the emergence of the kingfisher figurines at a particular time in a specific place. In this wider context, the article finally considers whether the southward expansion of the Eastern Han, with which the appearance of the figurines coincides, contributed to a re-configuration of north–south dynamics, shaping the general logic of human-kingfisher relations at the time.