China Women's Football Team wins the 2022 Women's Asian Cup in India


The famous painter, Mr. He Galin, captured this wonderful moment and painted the scene of the winning goal of the women's football team in a subtle way.

He Jialin, the resounding rose


Mr He Jialin exclaims: The clanging roses are back and the whole country rejoices!


In fact, the sport of football started very early in China. Football was called cuju in ancient times, and was an ancient recreational activity in China.


The term cuju dates back to the Han Dynasty. In Taiping Yu Lan (太平御览), vol. 754, citing Ying Shao's Feng Feng Tong (風俗通): "Hair pills are called jiu", and a pill-like object made of hair is a jiu. In the Hanshu (Hanshu - Wei Qing Huo Zaidi), there is a reference to "罔罔 (tà) 鞠", in which "鞠" refers to a ball, while "蹴" or "鹵" refers to kicking with the feet. (tà) jiu (鞠) refers to a ball, while "cu" or "zhaoxing" refers to kicking with the feet. In the first Qin dynasty, the term "cuju" (踏鞠), in the Han dynasty, and in the Tang dynasty, the terms "zhuqiu" (筑球) and "cuqiu" (蹴球) all refer to cuju in different eras.

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A bronze mirror with a football motif and its facsimile in the Hunan Provincial Museum


During the Eastern Han period, there are also records of women playing football. The Han portrait stone from Qufu in Shandong, which was unearthed, depicts three young girls playing football in a graceful manner, kicking a double ball. Another relic, the Nanyang Han Pictorial Stone, is also engraved with an image of a woman dancing with a football.

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During the Tang dynasty, women joined the cuju army on a large scale, and there were also specialised soccer players in the palace. They played without a goal, and were known for their ability to kick high and make fancy kicks. The poet Wang Jian of the Tang dynasty mentions in his 'Lyrics from the Palace' that 'the insiders of the cold eclipse play long white games', where 'white games' were a way of playing cuju for women in the palace at the time.


The Tanglin records that "today's musicians also have the play of stepping on the ball, making a painted wooden ball, one or two feet high, with female prostitutes and other tiptoes, the ball spinning and walking, haunting and coming and going, without fail, covering the legacy of ancient long cuju". This means that the musicians performed another kick, and the women who performed it could make the ball go exactly as they wished. It is clear that women were still very skilled at kicking the ball in this period.


The Song dynasty's Zhu Shengfei has a more specific description in his Konyuzhu Ji: "Two people kicked against each other, three people kicked in a corner, and the winner got a colour." If one does not understand, one can think of it as a kind of fancy football performance.


This recreational activity remained very popular with women into the Song dynasty, and according to Song records, the 'fan' emperor Song Weizong formed a 'royal women's cuju team' of around a hundred people, complete with uniform 'kimono', and each performance attracted 'thousands of spectators'.

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Ming, Du Sumi, Lady (partial), Shanghai Museum


By the Ming dynasty, women were even better at cuju than men. In the scene of women's cuju described by Wang Shizhen in General Pan's Lost Pearl, the women of the workshop outperformed the men in cuju. A woman called Peng Yunxiu was recorded in Chen Jiru's Taiping Qingxiao in the Ming Dynasty as "a woman of the Qing Fen, who took this skill with her and travelled the rivers and seas, and knocked on it, and was said to have a solution of sixteen, and was presented by Zhan Tongwen with a tumbling line." This means that Peng Yunxiu was a very good cuju player, with 16 different kicking styles, and that she was particularly good at the 'rolling and fiddling' act, and because she was so good at cuju, the literary figure of the time, Zhan Tongwen, even made a special article on 'Rolling and Fiddling' for her.

Ming, Du Sumi, Lady (partial), Shanghai Museum


Not only did such entertainment take place in the palace, but also among the people. According to Huan Kuan's "Salt and Iron Discourses on the Power of the Assassination", not only did the rich and powerful 'play bows and fight chickens', but the general public also 'played bows in poor alleys'. At the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, it is written in the Huai Ji Qu Lu that "the years were filled with gold and leather, and the soldiers used bows and horses as their business, while the families used cuju as their learning". Cuju even developed into a 'family school'. This shows that cuju was not the preserve of the military, let alone the royal family.

Ma Yuan (trans.) Cuju in the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection


During the Tang and Song dynasties, cuju became more and more folkloric, both in terms of the 'cold-food cuju' and the inclusion of women. "Cuju was common in the Tang dynasty, although it was mostly practised in the military. In the Song dynasty, it became more widespread, with Zhou Mi's "Old Wulin Stories - Putting on the Spring" recording that "the eyes were raised to the swinging of the swing and the smiling of the cuju. ...... So the Qingming Festival continued.


In the Yuan Dynasty period cuju lost its special status as a national ceremonial celebration like the Song Dynasty and completely flowed into folk development. In the Ming Dynasty, the History of the Ming Dynasty records that Zhang Shixin, the younger brother of the warlord Zhang Shicheng, "whenever he went out to the army, he would bring simaroubas and cuju, and embrace women to feast", and cuju had been reduced to a representative of the greed for pleasure.

Unknown, Ming Dynasty, Zhu Zhanji (partly), in the Palace Museum, Beijing


During the Qing dynasty the sport of 'cuju on ice' began to emerge. After the mid-Qing period, the traditional Chinese game of cuju was replaced by modern football with the introduction of modern western football.


Finally, congratulations once again to the Chinese women's football team for winning the championship!


Article source: Art Newspaper

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