Loyalty, Punishment, and Ink: Tattooed Bodies in the Song Dynasty
How a medieval Chinese empire wrote its fears, values, and discipline directly onto human skin.
When we think of ancient Chinese tattoos, we might imagine mythical beasts, flowing calligraphy, or outlaws with dragon sleeves. But during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), tattoos served a very different function. They weren’t art. They were bureaucracy. Discipline. Shame. Loyalty. Control.
In this period of high culture and tight surveillance, the body itself became an archive — of loyalty to the state, punishment for crimes, or stories of rebellion. Tattoos weren’t decorative: they were state-sanctioned inscriptions meant to bind, brand, and broadcast identity.
A Brief Glimpse into the Song Dynasty
Laborers with tattooed legs. Detail parts of Zhang Zeduan, Along the River during the Qingming Festival 《清明上河图》. Northern Song. Long scroll, ink and color on silk. The Palace Museum, Beijing
The Song dynasty was a pivotal period in Chinese history — a time of technological innovation, economic prosperity, and growing urban sophistication. It gave the world gunpowder weapons, movable type printing, paper money, and astonishing art and poetry. But it was also a period of intense centralization and surveillance.
After centuries of warlordism and rebellion, the Song emperors sought to consolidate control — especially over the military. This impulse to regulate extended even to the bodies of soldiers and criminals. In this climate, tattooing emerged not as rebellion, but as statecraft.
Bureaucratized Flesh: Tattoos as Military ID
Selling Eye Medicine 《卖眼药图》 (to a tattoed man) . Song Dynasty Period. Palace Museum, Beijing.
As the Song rulers restructured their empire, they sought to professionalize and monitor their massive military force. Soldiers were now full-time state employees — but with this came strict oversight. To track a soldier’s service and movement across battalions, the state turned to an unconventional solution: tattooing.
Every soldier was tattooed with a record of his enlistment, including:
Unit or battalion name
Geographic post
Military designation
What began as a simple ID mark could grow into an elaborate network of characters over time — especially for soldiers who were transferred, demoted, punished, or reassigned. The body became a canvas of career history, a kind of permanent résumé — or rap sheet — visible to all.
Unlike previous dynasties, where local commanders might tattoo their troops, the Song government centralized tattooing authority, embedding state-approved tattooists directly into military camps. These weren’t rogue markings — they were part of a system. A soldier’s skin was the property of the state, inscribed accordingly.
This wasn’t just logistical. It was symbolic: your loyalty was literally written on your body.
Punishment in Ink: Penal Tattooing and Exile
The Song state didn’t stop at soldiers. It revived a practice from even earlier eras: penal tattooing — the branding of criminals as a public form of humiliation and social exclusion.
Tattooing was often used in combination with exile, flogging, or forced labor. Criminals were tattooed on the face, making the shame inescapable. These were not stylized or subtle — they were often crude characters carved into skin with clear messages like:
強盜 (qiángdào) – “Bandit”
免斬 (miǎnzhǎn) – “Spared execution”
配軍中役 – “Sentenced to military labor”
Once marked, reintegration into society was nearly impossible. These tattoos were not just reminders to the wearer — they were warnings to everyone else. Even if a criminal completed their sentence, the stain remained.
The monopoly on tattooing extended here too: by 1003 CE, private punishment tattooing (e.g. by slaveowners or masters) was banned. The right to mark human skin belonged only to the state.
Ink and Allegiance: Loyalty Tattoos as Devotion and Defiance
Yue Fei’s mother tattooing his back. Photo/Modern Reinterpretation from Baidu Encyclopedia
While many bore state-issued tattoos by force, others voluntarily inscribed themselves as acts of radical loyalty or patriotic devotion. Some soldiers and generals tattooed their bodies with slogans expressing unwavering service to the emperor or hatred of enemy forces like the Khitans or Jurchens.
Common phrases included:
“Kill the Khitans with devotion” (赤心殺契丹)
“Forget home for the state, face death for the ruler” (出門忘家為國，臨陣忘死為主)
The most famous case is that of General Yue Fei (岳飛), a national folk hero, whose mother was said to have tattooed his back with the words:
“盡忠報國” — “Exhaust one’s loyalty in service of the state.”
While popular culture often misquotes the phrase as “精忠報國” (“Serve the country with pure loyalty”), historical records — such as the Songshi — confirm that the original wording was “盡忠”, emphasizing a readiness to sacrifice everything for the state.
Yet even these displays of faith could be dangerous. The Song state, obsessed with order and suspicion, often viewed such tattooed expressions as eccentric or politically provocative. Several generals who bore “loyalist” tattoos were later demoted, punished, or even executed — not because they lacked loyalty, but because they were seen as threateningly bold.
In this twisted logic, even love for the state could be a liability — especially when it was written in ink.
Ink of the Enemy: Rebels and Counterfeit States
Tattooing wasn’t a tool used only by the state. It was also co-opted by rebels and insurgent leaders, who saw the body as a way to instill discipline, belonging, and fear.
For instance:
The rebel Wang Ze tattooed all the men in his territory with:
“The righteous army is defeating the Zhao house” (義軍破趙得勝)
Another rebel, Li Shun, planned to tattoo the entire male population under his rule before being overthrown. (Note: This Li Shun is not to be confused with Li Zicheng, the 17th-century rebel leader who briefly founded the Shun dynasty after the Ming — they are unrelated figures.)
These rebel states mirrored the bureaucracy of the empire they defied — and tattooing was part of that imitation. The tattoo, once a mark of imperial power, became a way to build parallel systems of identity and control.
Ink and Outlaws: Water Margin and the Myth of Tattooed Rebellion
Lu Zhishen pulling out a weeping willow. Long Corridor of the Summer Palace, Beijing.
While many Song dynasty tattoos were imposed by the state — as punishment or control — others took on a mythic, romanticized life in the realm of literature. The most iconic example?《水滸傳》 Water Margin (also known as Outlaws of the Marsh) — a classic Chinese novel that turned tattooed rebels into folk heroes.
Written in its full form during the Ming dynasty, but set in the Song dynasty, Water Margin tells the story of 108 bandits who gather at Liangshan Marsh to rebel against a corrupt imperial system. Many of these outlaws are vividly described as having tattoos covering their bodies — a powerful literary association that links ink with:
Rebellion against injustice
Brotherhood among outcasts
Moral complexity in a corrupt world
Characters like:
Lu Zhishen (魯智深) – a monk with wild strength and full-body tattoos
Shi Jin (史進) – nicknamed "Nine Tattooed Dragons" for the inked dragons across his limbs
And others whose tattoos signal both martial prowess and outsider status
Though fictional, Water Margin reflects real-world associations that already existed in Song society — where tattoos marked soldiers, criminals, wanderers, and rebels. The novel didn’t invent the tattooed outlaw archetype, but it cemented it in Chinese popular culture for centuries to come.
Even today, echoes of Water Margin appear in tattoo flash, folklore, and cinema — proof that the ink of rebellion never fully fades.
Needle Histories: Personal Tattoos Beyond the State
Wei Xian: Turning Cart by the Lock Gate《无款闸口盘车》,Five Dynasties Early Song Scroll. Ink on silk. Shanghai Museum.
Not all tattoos in the Song period were militarized or criminal. Among the working classes, laborers, wanderers, and subcultural groups, tattoos also served as personal expression — a kind of skin-bound autobiography known as “needle histories.”
These could include:
Names of lovers or lost family
Places visited or battles fought
Gambling debts, poetic quotes, or moral codes
Some groups, like dock workers and mercenaries, had their own signature tattoo styles — such as “decorated legs”, with elaborate ink patterns winding around calves and thighs. Even high-ranking commanders occasionally adopted this trend to show unity with the lower ranks.
While the elite may have looked down on these tattoos, for the people who wore them, they were a way to assert identity in a rigid social system.
Scarred by Erasure: Tattoo Removal and Resistance
Moxibustion by Li Tang, Song dynasty: The fragment of this painting depicts an itinerant doctor conducting moxibustion on a patient, while three people are restraining the patient and the doctor's assistant on the right is preparing a medicinal patch.
Tattoos could be permanent records — but some tried to erase them.
Tattoo removal, though rare, was performed using painful methods like moxibustion — burning the skin with heated tools to scar over the ink. The results were often disfiguring, and the scars served as a different kind of mark: a memory of shame, or of resistance.
Some famous generals, like Di Qing, refused to remove their facial tattoos even after rising in rank — using their ink as a badge of pride and solidarity with common soldiers. In these cases, tattoos once meant for stigma were reclaimed as honor.
Conclusion: The Empire Beneath the Skin
The Song dynasty was a sophisticated, literate, bureaucratic society — one that saw the human body not as sacred or private, but as a canvas for political order. Tattoos in this context were not ornamental. They were tools of surveillance, obedience, punishment, identity — even poetry or protest.
In today’s tattoo culture, we often celebrate the power of ink to tell personal stories or express inner truths. But in the Song dynasty, tattoos could be the state’s story etched on your body, whether you wanted it or not.
Yet even in this tightly controlled world, people found ways to turn ink into resistance — into memory, into meaning, into rebellion.
Every mark had a message.
Want to explore more about tattoo history in unexpected places?
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