Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives.

• Author: Choo, Jessey

Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives. Edited by PATRICIA BUCKLEY EBREY, PING YAO, and CONG ELLEN ZHANG. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2020. Pp. xvi + 304. $30.

Funerary biographies, which were generally produced shortly after a person's death, were inscribed on a stone slab that was then placed near or inside the grave. Their principal functions--especially for those erected aboveground, as in the earliest surviving examples from the Eastern Han (25-220 CE)--were to convey information about the subject's life, family, and burial, as well as to eulogize him or her. As their production spread throughout society in the subsequent centuries, funerary biographies evolved as both a literary and a funerary practice. In the early medieval period (200-500 CE), they became a respected literary genre and an effective tool for members of prominent families to establish individual and collective identities and memories distinct from those assigned by the reigning regimes. The functions of funerary biographies further diversified during the late medieval period (500-1000 CE), when entombing them with the dead became ubiquitous. Because funerary biographies could also be distributed and collected as manuscripts or rubbings, they became billboards for authors and calligraphers to advertise their virtuosity, thereby expanding the extent and duration of circulation as well as the sophistication of this commemorative genre. Over the years, the craft of writing burial biographies became more sophisticated. Today, the vividness with which these primary sources depicted the deceased's character, circumstances, and interactions with others both within and outside the family circle provides modern scholars with a wealth of information on the subjects, producers, and milieux in which these primary sources were produced, while illuminating aspects of everyday life in premodern China that are rarely captured in other types of primary sources.

The Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives is an excellent addition to a growing corpus of scholarship that studies or makes substantial use of these resources. Directed at undergraduate students, the anthology includes an introduction, full translations of funerary biographies, a teaching guide, a bibliography, and an index. The general introduction describes the evolution of burial biographies as a commemorative genre and practice, and the production and...