Description
Book SynopsisTraces how Chinese came to view death as an opportunity to fashion and convey social identities and memories during the medieval period (200-1000) and the Tang dynasty (618-907). In particular, the book details the growing emphasis on remembrance as an expression of filial piety and the grave as a focal point of ancestral sacrifice.
Trade ReviewInscribing Death is simply the best book in any language on one of the most important elements of Chinese culture: its mortuary practice. Drawing on a stunning array of primary and secondary sources, including a fine selection of newly available
muzhiming (entombed epitaphs), Choo centers her exploration on Tang burial practices that were new or controversial—joint burials, divination, and soul-summoning burials—but her analysis includes the classical sources that were consulted and sometimes recast to solve problems regarding the disposition of the dead. This is, thus, an indispensable resource for those seeking to understand the rich technical mortuary vocabulary of Chinese sources, many discussed here for the first time in a non-Chinese language. But it is Choo’s extensive study of
muzhiming, where the dead sometimes speak for themselves, voicing preferences for their burial and remembrance, that gives this study a liveliness and immediacy belied by the title." —Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Arizona State University
"Jessey Choo’s rigorous, vivid, and lucidly argued account of Tang Dynasty mourning and burial practice is based on the many thousands of biographical inscriptions engraved in stone (
muzhiming), both retrieved and transmitted, now available to scholarship. All specialists of late medieval Chinese religion, social history, and gender studies, as well as students of medieval Chinese canonical scholarship and late medieval literature, will be indebted to her for the scope and clarity of her research.
Inscribing Death is a significant contribution to Tang studies." —David L. McMullen, University of Cambridge
