Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive
from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they
typically focus on the deceased's biography and exemplary words and
deeds, expressing the survivors' longing for the dead. These
epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not
leave a mark politically, and children-people who are not well
documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories
and local gazetteers. This anthology of translations makes
available funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years,
from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for
their value as teaching material for courses in Chinese history,
literature, and women's studies as well as world history. Because
they include revealing details about personal conduct, families,
local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices,
these epitaphs illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of
daily life. Most can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, and
they stimulate investigation of topics such as the emotional tenor
of family relations, rituals associated with death, Confucian
values, women's lives as written about by men, and the use of
sources assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially
effective when combined with more readily available primary sources
such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses,
and anecdotal stories, promising to generate provocative discussion
of literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers
shape their accounts.
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