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  • At Home in Her Tomb: Lady Dai and the Ancient Chinese Treasures of Mawangdui by Christine Liu-Perkins
  • Elizabeth Bush
Liu-Perkins, Christine. At Home in Her Tomb: Lady Dai and the Ancient Chinese Treasures of Mawangdui; illus. by Sarah S. Brannen. and with photographs. Charlesbridge, 2014. 80p. Library ed. ISBN 978-1-58089-370-1 $19.95 R Gr. 5-9.

Methane gas and a layer of white clay were tip-offs that laborers building an air raid shelter in 1971 Hunan Province had made a critical discovery. Formal excavations soon began which uncovered the two thousand year old tombs of the emperorappointed marquis Li Cang, his wife Xin Zhui, and one of their sons. All the tombs yielded priceless grave goods, but that of the wife, known by the honorific Lady Dai, also held her remarkably intact remains, so well-preserved that tissue was soft, joints somewhat flexible, and even stomach contents full of undigested melon seeds. Liu-Perkins is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic docent, leading readers through the particulars of the excavation and reveling in the enormous amount of information the find revealed about the Qin and early Han periods, which had [End Page 465] been presumed to be forever lost to object decay and human destruction. Books that scholars had only known from references in other works were unearthed, along with musical instruments still playable, silk maps still readable, game boards still playable (if only we knew all the rules), foods still aromatic, and equally important, a cadaver that could be fully autopsied. The author supports her neatly organized chapters with brief, conjectural musings on Lady Dai’s life, plenty of diagrams and photographs, a glossary with Chinese pronunciations, a dual timeline of Chinese and Changsha (Li Cang’s kingdom) history during the relevant period, quotation sources, bibliography, index, and a substantive history of Chinese unification under the first emperors. This material will be a boon for archaeology fans who have exhausted standard library offerings on Middle Eastern and occidental mummies and excavations, as well as a vital resource for collections that are top-heavy on the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army.

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