Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives ed. by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao and Cong Ellen Zhang (review)

The promotional text on the back cover is a good description of what this commented anthology is aiming for: “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.”

We learn about the past by studying not only institutions, ideas, and major events, but also how individuals experience them. That is not so easy when we talk about China. In the history of that country, traces have often been erased, especially when they related to the marginalized (from the perspective of the ruling power). Unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s is an overwhelming illustration of the desire of those in power to thoroughly destroy traces of individuals.

Fortunately, many “funerary biographies” (in fact a tautology, because every serious biography is written after someone’s death) are survived from imperial China (221 B.C.E.–1911 C.E.). Of course, these inscriptions cannot be considered by modern standards of biography, if only because these epitaphs were usually commissioned by relatives. But also, the epitaphs written on behalf of the next of kin must be accurately put into context, according to social status, under which imperial regime, but also to which part of China these texts can be classified. One should not expect critical remarks on these gravestones, but from a different perspective they are nevertheless very valuable. If it is taken into account that such inscriptions, which were often hundreds of words long, usually related to a richer upper class there is still interesting material to be extracted from them.

This book contains translations of thirty examples or private biographical accounts, spanning the second to the nineteenth century. We have to imagine a muzhiming, Chinese for an “entombed account with inscription,” as a square-shaped piece of stone, some 40 to 160 centimeters, into which a biography is carved (p. 4). Sometimes there was a cover on top to cover the text. The production of a muzhiming could sometimes take years. The oldest funerary biography, discovered in 1929 in Luoyang, is from 106 C.E., during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). During this period, epitaphs were not buried with the coffins, but were etched on standing stones erected above the grave. We know of examples where the deceased wrote their own funerary biographies. And one Mr. Wu even built his own shrine, and his inscription even mentions how much he paid for its construction.

The self-authored epitaphs confront us with the question of whether we can still speak here of funerary “biography” or of funerary “autobiography.” This is an interesting question, because up to China today, autobiography and biography have often been lumped together as Life Writing, obscuring the fundamental distinction between these two genres. I, therefore, cannot agree with what the editors of this book claim: “Autobiographies are relatively scarce in any form within the Chinese literary tradition” (p. 48). Centers for Life Writing have been established at dozens of universities in China in recent years, for example at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. And if you look at the curricula of these academic centers, their attention is only given to autobiography.

From the fifth century onward, funerary texts were considered a literary genre. Not only practical information about the year of birth, place of residence, and so on were mentioned from then on, but also the public feats of arms of the deceased were remembered, especially if those feats were of high morality...