Taizong's hell

The Chinese hell scrolls presented here treat the afterlife as a spectacle, as a display intended for public consumption. Ostensibly based on Tang Emperor Taizong's visit to hell in the first half of the seventh century C.E., they attract their viewers through their dark and yet cartoonish torture scenes, appealing to the same morbid curiosity fed by gothic novels, horror movies and Halloween ghosts in the West. Yet their main function was not entertainment but didactic, propagating a basic message of retribution. Every act of goodness will be rewarded; every act of evil will be justly answered. Releasing an animal intended for slaughter or financing the distribution of sutras will be recorded by scribes in heaven, improving one's chances of escaping hell for the "Pure Land" in the west. Cheating in the marketplace with deceptive weights and measures or behaving in an unfilial manner toward one's parents will be revealed in the karma mirror at judgment time, dooming the perpetrator to hideous torture. Retribution is certain, and the only unkown variable is just when it might occur. It could come in a year, a day or an hour, and that uncertainty in itself was incentive for immediate and constant moral vigilence.

The tradition of depicting hell as a bureaucratic series of courts overseen by magistrates dates back to at least the Tang Dynasty (618-907), but the hell scrolls here are much more recent and date to the 19th and 20th centuries. These scrolls are typically informed by stories preserved in popular epics such as "The journey to the West" (a.k.a. "Monkey") and operas such as "Mulian saves his mother," and characters from these various tales - including the character of Taizong himself - appear among the torture scenes. Often in sets of ten, the scrolls were displayed during protracted funeral observances to give an itinerary of the deceased's days between death and rebirth. The tenth hell serves as a redistribution center for the souls of the dead as they yet again attempt to become good human beings unless their sins were sufficiently heinous to merit another kind of rebirth....

Developed by K.E. Brashier at Reed College with the technical assistance of Margot Kniffin, Amanda Stephenson and Andrew Wallace, this introduction to "Taizong's hell" draws upon a collection of more than fifty hell scrolls, many of which were first brought together by Joe Kagle who began his search for such pieces of art in the 1960s. They are now held by a professor at Reed College who is developing an extensive educational project and database using their texts, stories and graphics. As a common tool in the diffused religions of late imperial China, these scrolls are valuable because they include a great deal of explicit texts and cartouches detailing the merits and sins deserving of retribution.

To enter hell, either proceed to the First Hell via the gate to the right or begin with the Site map. On each hell scroll, there is a zoom function for closer inspection, and on some systems, the user may need to click on the "Zoom in" link and then on the scroll itself to engage the magnification. There are also a large number of "hot spots" on the scroll that link to more detailed images, further information and photographs of historic sites in China (shot in the autumn of 2007) that similarly depict hell's retributions.