This is an insightful book exploring early Chinese mortuary religion by focusing on archaeological materials. It distinguishes itself by the author's solid knowledge of the primary and secondary literature in this field and, more importantly, by adopting various perspectives and methodologies from archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists.
The object of this book is to explore “burial practices of Warring States (ca. 453–221 b.c.e.), Qin (221–206 b.c.e.), and early Han (206 b.c.e.–9 c.e.).” Recent archaeological discoveries greatly enrich our knowledge of this period, and this particular era witnessed significant changes in mortuary practices such as the emergence of horizontal chamber tombs, the pervasive use of spirit artifacts (mingqi 明器), more frequent appearance of anthropomorphic and hybrid images, buried manuscripts, and newly introduced burial objects. The author traces the evolution of these changes and provides provocative interpretations of their meanings in a comparative framework.
Following the archaeology of religion proposed by Buddhologist Gregory Schopen (p. 14), the author treats archaeological discoveries as an independent source of cultural and religious expression: independent in the sense that archaeological finds do not serve to validate conventional claims preserved in our transmitted texts. But it is challenging and risky to generate meaning and thereby reconstruct a cultural and theological milieu from those excavated artifacts. The reason for this is simple. Both the preservation and excavation of archeological remains are conditioned by various factors. Remains are fragmentary, representing only a fraction of the material culture in a historical period. While we search for coherent and seamless narratives to explain the religious practices of a particular place and time, we must acknowledge the coexistences of different and even contradictory beliefs and traditions. Making a sound interpretation requires us to analyze available data carefully in historical, sociopolitical, and archeological contexts, but we must also employ perspectives and conceptual frameworks provided by the study of religion outside the field of Chinese history. In this book, numerous references are made to ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and ancient Egypt, and we find lengthy discussions of methodologies in footnotes. The book's broad vision and comparative approach is one of its great assets.
Chapter 1 examines changing attitudes towards death and the dead in early China by investigating the new religious pantheons of the Warring States period. The changing attitudes towards death have been an important research topic in Western academia since the 1970s. Drawing upon the textual records of divinations, sacrifices, and exorcisms performed for the tomb occupants, the author shows us that a group of new spirits emerged: identified as individuals who died without progeny, who perished violently, or who were slain by weapons. These changes can be situated in a specific historical context in which the scale of military confrontations between states, as well as internal struggles within states or lineages, increased, resulting in large numbers of casualties and violent deaths. Victors at times excluded the men and women who died in these conflicts from lineage cemeteries and intentionally chiseled out their cast bronze inscriptions, especially the owners’ names, in an effort to erase their enemies from public memory and prevent them from reuniting with ancestors in lineage cemeteries. The deceased were thus left alone, hungry, and forgotten. The dead of this new category were perceived as vengeful ghosts who presented a threat to the living and thus needed to be pacified or exorcized. In light of this new group of vicious dead, the systematic use of spiritual artifacts—copies of real objects that do not have a practical function—as well as the personal belongings of the deceased, can be interpreted as “tie-breaking rituals,” as those burial objects helped the bereaved to reduce and eventually sever their ties with the dead.
Chapter 2 documents the change from vertical pit tombs to horizontal chamber tombs. Based on previous studies, the author explains the spatial changes in early Chinese burials in light of the anthropological, architectural, and archaeological theories of ritual performance (p. 56, n. 9–11). While vertical pit tombs aimed to hide the corpse, the horizontal chamber tombs, with grandiose mounds, created a public display of social status and prestige. Horizontal chamber tombs with open ramps facilitated the burial of the husband and wife together, which reflects a significant social change in this era: with the established empire, nuclear families replaced lineage as the building blocks of society. Furthermore, the author contends that new-style tombs helped to conduct sacrifices and mourning within the tombs, a practice that “separate[d] the dead from the living and manage[d] the pollution and contagion caused by death” (p. 56). This spatial separation is associated with the idea discussed in the Chapter 1: that the dead were baleful and potentially threatening ghosts that needed to be pacified and segregated.
Chapter 3 examines the art-historical topics of anthropomorphic representations of the dead, tomb figurines, and hybrid images of the gods in terms of the dynamic relationships between the living and otherworldly powers. Exploring the magic power of image-making, the author contends that a variety of forms and methods were used in early China to communicate with invisible religious powers, secure their presence and control them. Lai writes that “[r]epresenting someone or something in material form was in some sense seen as controlling the subject itself” (p. 105). This echoes early Chinese practices of “black magic,” in which a doll designated with a person's name was thought to do harm to the real person. Whereas figurines buried in tombs were substitutes for human victims to accompany and serve the deceased, the creation and burial of a figurine of someone was thought to affect the fortune of the person in this world. Therefore, as the author discusses, the early Chinese were ambivalent towards verisimilitude—the realistic representation of the human figure (pp. 105–15). Figurines were likely not one-to-one representations of the human victims, since we seldom find figurines inscribed with a specific personal name. In order to mitigate the vicious affect the figurines might have on the living, the tomb figurines might have been intended to represent a certain type of person rather than a particular man or woman. The author's engagement with this subject provokes interesting questions, but due to limited sources, these insights remain intriguing speculations.
Chapter 4 explores documents addressed to the underworld, including funerary-object lists, letters to the underworld bureaucracy, and funerary travel documents. For the funerary-object lists, the author points out that qiance 遣策—lists of grave goods—should be distinguished from fengshu 賵書—records of donated items. These lists did not aim to record all burial goods, but targeted specific categories. They covered objects that indicated the tomb occupant's social status, such as ritual vessels and chariots. They also included newly introduced categories, such as clothing and furniture. The lists had multiple functions. They could have a practical use, indicating the locations of certain objects in the tombs, and they could serve as a form of bookkeeping to control sumptuary spending. They might have been read publicly before the funeral processions when all grave goods and funerary gifts were displayed. Public reading of lists not only showed the wealth and social status of the deceased, but also had a magico-religious function: “[T]e public reading of lists functioned at some level as metonyms for the objects” (p. 145). This helps to explain why not all of the listed grave goods were found in the tombs. The religious efficacy of written documents and their public reading is further confirmed by the author's discussion of funerary documents for convicts. Those documents claimed that local authorities had cleared the convicts’ crimes, and convicts could thereby be registered as commoners in the underworld. Nevertheless, the format and content of these documents indicates that they were likely to be forgeries, and convicts’ records had not in fact been expunged.
Chapter 5 was first published as a journal article over ten years ago. Instead of the tomb being the happy abode of the deceased, the author argues that the departed soul took an arduous journey to an imagined cosmic destination in the northwest of the universe. The author carefully analyzes the Jiudian incantation, which indicates that the departed souls of the war dead must make a trip from the tomb to the abode of the dead. By the late Warring States period, this otherworldly journey applied not only to war dead but also to other deceased men and women. In light of this understanding, the daybooks might be understood as manuals guiding this dangerous postmortem travel. The new category of burial objects, such as personal belongings, household articles, and food provisions could then be understood as travel paraphernalia. Among the various paraphernalia for travel, lamps reflect the popular concerns that in the postmortem journey, the dead would travel to the northwest in darkness. Like the lamps, other items in the travel paraphernalia might also have apotropaic functions. “Personal belongings can serve as substitutes for the human body and were offered to deities to whom the individual was devoted” (p. 179). As interesting as this interpretation is, the author states that “[t]he examples studied here must be treated cautiously in view of the wide range of practices and beliefs that co-existed; sometimes discrepancies surface even within the same burial. Tombs are multidimensional entities, and no one line of reasoning is likely to do full justice to every feature” (p. 186).
The archaeology of religion is fascinating but also extremely intricate. The author should be praised for his supreme ability to synthesize various views, and his innovative perspectives in interrogating complicated features of Chinese mortuary practices. As provocative as many arguments are, however, some parts of the book are densely written and call for more elaboration, such as adding primary sources or providing a more detailed account of the reasoning behind various claims for readers without extensive background in this field.
