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.
