Artistic depictions of individuals from foreign lands date to as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907). Tang tomb figurines include individuals wearing foreign costumes and with the aforementioned “monstrous” physical attributes, including bulging eyes, protruding noses, and gnarled bodies. They echo Chinese ethnographic discourses that developed in the third century and describe the physical, cultural, and personality traits of non-Chinese people as “barbaric” and “bestial” to emphasize their status as outsiders.  

In such ethnographic texts, one common characteristic that distinguishes a “civilized” society from a “barbaric” one is that the “civilized” live a sedentary life and engage in farming while the latter are nomadic. Painters often situated their nomadic subjects in pastures or in a hunting scene to make clear the differences between the “civilized” Chinese people (historically described as the Han Chinese) and their nomadic adversaries, who occupied the vast steppe lands to the north and frequently raided the Chinese border.  

Another type of painting that depicts monstrous figures features foreign tribute-bearers, gift-bearing envoys from kingdoms that pledged to be China’s vassal states. An album attributed to Li Gonglin shows envoys from ten different states joyously traveling toward the Chinese capital with abundant gifts. These figures are rendered with gnarled profiles, glaring eyes, and hairstyles that do not conform to ancient Confucian etiquette, which prescribes that grown men wear their hair as a bun at the crown of their heads. Complementing the alien features of these tributers are the items they bear as gifts: for example, the envoys from Sanfoqi 三佛齊 (Srivajaya, in present-day Indonesia) are traveling with a mythical horned beast that bears on its back a large box decorated with a finely embroidered tapestry cover. These extraordinary visual cues embody the auspicious and celebratory tone associated with the Sino-centric world order, which dictates that the rulers of the vassal states willingly send tributary envoys to the Chinese capital and present the emperor with gifts at regular intervals.