In China, rock art is spread mainly in the border regions – carvings and engravings in the north of the country and paintings in the south. Before the beginning of the 21st century, research books and albums of petroglyphs were published in four administrative units at provincial level in the north-west of the county: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang and Qinghai. Petroglyphs of Inner Mongolia were studied and published by Gai Shanlin, Liang Zhenhua and N. Dalengurib. The earliest and the latest books by Gai Shanlin available to us (published in 1985 and 2002 respectively) were entirely devoted to the interpretation of rock carvings and searches for their analogies. All four monographs on Ningxia rock art – by Zhou Xinghua, Li Xiangshi and Zhu Cunshi, Xu Cheng and Wei Zhong were published almost simultaneously, at the beginning of the 1990s. Ancient rock art of Xinjiang was published in albums by Zhao Yangfeng, Wang Linshan and Wang Bo and in books by Wang Binghua and Su Beihai. The monograph by Tang Huisheng and Zhang Wenhua was devoted to the description of Qinghai petroglyphs and the problems of their interpretation. The album of photos “The Rock Arts of China” is a kind of a guide to the main rock art sites known by 1993 in all the Chinese provinces. Generally, it can be stated that modern Chinese scientific rock art research was born in the first half of the 1980s, when the first articles on rock carvings started to appear in Chinese archaeological periodicals and flourished in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, when quite a number of monographs were published.
Traditional Music or Religious Ritual? Ancient Rock Art Illumined by Bedouin Custom