Tracing the Decline of Decorated Tombs in the Yuan Dynasty

After the Yuan dynasty, tombs that simulated aboveground spaces in their painted and sculpted decorations, which had been a dominant tomb type in China for hundreds of years, essentially stopped being constructed. But why? Through an examination of several Yuan dynasty burials, this paper considers trends indicative of a diminishing confidence in the ability of painting, sculpture, and architecture to fabricate a virtual afterlife space—a shift of considerable art historical significance. The paper also looks into the relationship between the tombs’ painted and sculpted elements and their grave goods to better understand how these objects later functioned without the context of simulated imagery. 

About Aurelia Campbell

Aurelia Campbell’s research centers on architecture and material culture from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (1279-1911) in China. She is interested in issues concerning materials and technologies, sacred objects and spaces, and the relationship between the imperial court and outlying regions.

The Power of Writing: Mural Inscriptions and the Making of Identity in Song and Jin Tombs

This paper examines writing on the walls of northern Chinese tombs of the Song and Jin periods, asking how written words helped to identify, present, and construct the dead. Unlike epitaphs, which recorded lineage, office, and moral character in standardized forms, writing on tomb walls entered the funerary space in more flexible, visual ways, often passing into and out of images. Drawing on four cases—inscriptions naming the deceased, captions and narratives of filial exemplars, transcribed poems and dramatic lyrics, and studio names and writing-like decoration—I argue that such writing served not only as textual information but also as visual and ritually efficacious media. It marked the tomb as a commemorative space, made the deceased present and ritually venerated, and projected ideals of filiality, literary cultivation, and domestic refinement. By attending to the mutual conversion of image and text and to the efficacy attributed to writing, the paper reconsiders how tomb inscriptions helped to make, rather than merely describe, posthumous identity.

About Fei Deng

Fei Deng's major research areas are visual culture of the Song and Yuan periods and sacred and mortuary art of mid-imperial China. Specific topics of concern include representation, materiality and historiography. Publications are: “A Study of Half-opened Doors in the Song and Yuan Visual Culture”, “Reading Scenes of Filial Piety Stories in the Burial Context: A Study of Song Decorated Tomb in Henan”, etc. Her current research examines mainly pictorial scenes in these tombs to gain insights into the lives of the tombs’ inhabitants, their beliefs, and changes in burial practice and death ritual in mid-imperial China.

Image credit: Detail of the north wall of the Jin-dynasty tomb at Xiaoguan Village, Zhangzi County, Shanxi Province

From Their Cradle to Her Grave: Unearthing Social Identities and Gender at the Lü Family Cemetery  

The well-known excavated cemetery of the Northern Song Lü 呂family in Lantian, Shaanxi offers an unparalleled funerary archive that includes numerous grave goods and detailed tomb epitaphs. Among the twenty-nine tombs cradling the remains and belongings of the family members, one can find the tomb of Miss Ma 馬氏, the concubine of Lü Fen 呂蕡 (999–1074) and the wet nurse of his third son, Lü Dajun 呂大鈞 (1030–1082), the author of her epitaph. Consisting of three parts, this paper deliberates on the unique inclusion of Miss Ma in this family cemetery. The first part examines her epitaph and the grave goods found in her tomb to reflect on her position within the Lü family. The second part situates the different roles attributed to her in their socio-historical contexts. The third part considers the epitaph in the context of women’s funerary texts. Although Miss Ma’s epitaph exhibits typical formulaic conventions, it showcases her social mobility and her interrelated social identities, which can further our understanding of women’s lived experiences.

About Tali Hershkovitz

Tali Hershkovitz' research interests include Women and Gender in Late Medieval China during the Song Dynasty, Women's Religious Lives, Spaces; Discourse on Female Soteriology, Transcendence, Images of Nuns, Laywomen in Religious Texts as well as Miracle Tales, Zhiguai Stories from this Period and Earlier.

The Intersectional Dead: Funerary Portraits from the Hexi Corridor, ca. 1300

How to depict the deceased for burial varied in middle-period China. Despite their broadly shared ritual contexts with aboveground portraiture, their relationship to portrait-making in the realm of the living was rarely a direct doubling: the underground burial chambers defied a unified or standardized system of “tomb portrait.” This paper explores the fourteenth-century cemetery of the Wang family in Zhang County, Gansu Province, as a case from the heart of the Hexi Corridor— historically significant cultural crossroads, where distinct forms of funerary portraiture were practiced. By delving into their plurality, the research uncovers the negotiation between disparate sets of dichotomies, such as body/representation, non-elite/elite, painting/sculpture, wood/stone, women/men, and “Chinese”/ “non-Chinese.” Understanding the multifarious modes of negotiation will reveal how heterogeneous cultural and epistemic practices informed the art of individuating the dead, eluding a concept of the singular identity based on verisimilitude that was becoming prevalent in the living society.

About Jeehee Hong

Jeehee Hong is a specialist in the ritual art and visual cultures of middle-period China (ninth to fourteenth century CE). Her first book, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016), explores complex intersections of the visual, mortuary, and everyday worlds, and demonstrates a new phase in the conception of the netherworld and the practice of ancestral worship in China at the beginning of the second millennium. She is currently working on three main topics; the first project engages the ontological understanding of the face as a field of negotiations among social, religious, visual conventions in the visual arts of middle-period China; the second investigates changing epistemology of sense perceptions in the visual field from early to middle period; the third is a collaborative effort to probe the boundaries and locality of visual cultures in medieval and middle-period China. Her research questions bring together various mediums and formal categories of art, often inspired by cross-cultural phenomena in the visual world.

Image credit: Portrait of the deceased. Tomb No. 13, Wang Shixian family cemetery. Zhang County, Gansu Province. Ink on wood. 14th century

Neo-Confucianism in Southern Song and Yuan Burials

The daoxue movement marked a turbulent chapter in Southern Song intellectual development. Banned briefly from 1198 to 1202, the daoxue school was later sanctioned as orthodox during Emperor Lizong’s (1205–1264) reign and enjoyed state patronage until the end of the dynasty. A few Southern Song tombs bear witness to the influence of this intellectual movement. Some tombs were furnished with items that signaled their owners’ intellectual identity—such as printed books by a Northern Song master or silverware featuring the Taiji diagram and the Eight Trigrams—while others were constructed in ways that aligned with Zhu Xi’s instructions in the Family Rituals. Taking these tombs as a point of departure, this study examines how Zhu Xi’s ideas of proper death rituals and burials shaped the real-world practices of his followers in southeast China during the Southern Song period and later spread to non-Han officials in north China during the Yuan dynasty. It identifies the burial elements associated with Neo-Confucianism and investigates the intellectual affiliations of these tomb owners, ultimately illustrating how the ritual ideals of Zhu Xi’s school penetrated the burial sphere in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

About Ya-hwei Hsu

Hsu has published extensively on the subjects of Chinese antiquarianism and collecting culture, spanning from the Song to the Ming dynasty. Her research interests have now expanded to include the burial culture of the Liao, Song, and Jin dynasties. In addition, she is leading a project called 'Middle Period Chinese Tombs,' which aims to comprehensively and systematically catalogue the contents of Chinese tombs from the tenth to the fourteenth century.

Image credit: Silver cup with Taiji and Bagua pattern, excavated from the tomb of Shi Shengzu (1192–1274) in Quzhou, Zhejiang

Differentiation and Transformation: Probing the Heterogeneity of Two Halls of Longevity from the Yuan Dynasty

This article examines the tomb of Han Yun 韓贇 (1276) and the tomb of Wu Qing 武慶 and his wife, Madam Jing 景 (1309), both located in present-day Shanxi Province. Constructed prior to their owners’ deaths, the tombs were referred to at the time as “halls of longevity” (shoutang 壽堂). This study begins with a close examination of the inscriptions in the tombs. Besides demonstrating that they were intended to either articulate the tombs’ intended functions or to facilitate their realization, it also reveals the tomb patrons’ perceptions of the tomb owners’ identities and their evolving relationships with their families. Turning to the tombs’ visuality and simulated materiality, the second half of my study explores how their designers drew upon the effects of inscriptions and painting formats to establish a visual and physical boundary between two incompatible domains: one functioning as a ritual space for ancestral worship, the other as an underground dwelling. Through drawing a line of demarcation, the designers prepared for the inevitable transformation of the tombs following their owners’ deaths. 

About Yi-bang Li

Yi-bang Li's research focuses on the materiality and formats of middle-period Chinese paintings and their interactions with the intended viewers. His dissertation, Between Surface and Space: Painted Walls in Middle-period China (8th to 12th Century), explores the relationship between the spatiality and pictorial designs of middle-period murals, as well as how both aspects shaped architectural space and the perceptual experience of their intended viewers. He is working on an article about the Buddhist murals in the Mañjuśrī Hall of the Yanshan Monastery and a book project on the Chinese tomb murals of the 8th-14th centuries.

Image credit: The inscription in the mural on the west wall of the burial chamber of Li Yi. Yuan dynasty, 1331. Zhouzhou, Hebei. After Xu Haifeng, "Hebei Zhouzhou Yuandai bihua mu," 52

About Jeffrey Moser

Jeffrey Moser’s research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China. He is also interested in the problem of historical agency, and the interconnections between ecological, technological, and perceptual change over time. His most recent book, Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (University of Chicago Press), examines the role that the rediscovery and decipherment of ancient bronzes in eleventh-century China played in restructuring medieval understandings of the relationship between words, images, and things. Other publications—on such subjects as ceramics, ink painting, antiquarianism, visual exegesis, and geography—are linked through a consistent interrogation of the ways in which new modes of attention to the material world, both past and present, catalyze new understandings of the past.

About Dagmar Schäfer

Dagmar Schäfer's interest is the history and sociology of technology of China, focusing on the paradigms configuring the discourse on technological development, past and present. She has published widely on the Premodern history of China (Song-Ming) and technology, materiality, the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems, and the changing role of artifacts—texts, objects, and spaces—in the creation, diffusion, and use of scientific and technological knowledge. Her current research focus is the historical dynamics of concept formation, situations, and experiences of action through which actors have explored, handled and explained their physical, social, and individual worlds. Dagmar Schäfer is Honorary Professor at Technische Universität Berlin (History of Science and Technology), Freie Universität Berlin (China Studies), and at Northwest University, Xi'an.

Unearthing the Lives of Local Elite Women of the Yuan Dynasty: the Wang Family Tombs as Case Study

This paper investigates the women buried in the Wang Family Tombs in southern Gansu province. Through an analysis of information from funerary epitaphs (muzhiming) and objects that were interred with the deceased, we can go some way in understanding the ways in which local elite women were memorialized in Yuan China. Tombs with female tomb occupants from the Mongol period exist throughout Mongolia and China, including in Gansu, Shaanxi, Hebei, and Jiangsu provinces. The Mongol empire in general, and the Yuan dynasty in particular, was highly diverse and cultural customs can be connected to a wide variety of practices: some indigenous to the Mongols, some borrowed from other northern groups, and others adopted from local contexts. Therefore, an understanding of the local environment is important when approaching individual tombs and their contents. Local environment encompasses customs specific to a region, as well as those traditions and material usages carried with women, deriving from both her natal family and her husband’s family. Here, I use the Wang family as a lens through which the role of local female elites in forming and disseminating the heterogeneity of Mongol culture can be understood. 

About Eiren Shea

Eiren Shea's principal fields of research include arts of the Mongol period, the Silk Road, China, Central Asia, and Persia, with a special focus on textiles. She is also interested in East-West cultural exchange more broadly. Her interest in textiles has led her to pursue research in public and private collections in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Taiwan, and China. To better study the material she also completed the intensive textile analysis course offered by the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA) in Lyon. Her book, Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020) focuses on textiles and dress of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth century and investigates how this newly-confederated group from the Steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century and impacted the arts of China, West Asia, and even Europe.

A Tomb of Many Faces: Rethinking the Burials of Quanzhen Daoists Song Defang and Pan Dechong

The tombs of two Quanzhen Daoists central to the construction of the Yongle Palace, Song Defang and Pan Dechong, were excavated in 1959 and relocated along with this renowned thirteenth-century Daoist monastery to its present site. This paper revisits these burials as dynamic spaces where multiple, and sometimes contradictory, expressions of identity converged and negotiated. Comparing with contemporaneous Daoist and lay burials in north China, I argue that their austere construction deliberately evokes ascetic practices of the Quanzhen founder, Wang Chongyang, who conceptualized tomb as a transformative site for relinquishing worldly attachments. In contrast, the finely carved stone sarcophagi enclosing the masters’ corpses helped to perform the lineage identity within the broader Quanzhen community that became increasingly regionalized in this period. Embedded in the material, pictorial, and socio-political networks of southern Shanxi, these tombs fashioned a multivalent image of their occupants and their disciples—one that appealed to both religious practitioners and lay patrons, yet also rendered the Quanzhen order vulnerable to controversy and even scandal.

About Lucien Sun

Lucien Sun is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. He also spent a year at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. He is currently interested in the visual culture of Southern Shanxi during the Jin–Yuan periods, and how picture in its broad sense moved across space and media under the Mongol Empire. His recent book chapter is about the Codex Mendoza, an Aztec codex created about twenty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Words to Avert the Inconstant: Meaning and Purpose in Epitaphs of the Song Era

The inclusion of epitaphs or tomb-tablets (muzhiming 墓誌銘) among the mortuary practices of elites in China emerged during the Eastern Han dynasty (CE 25-220), such that, with the advent of the Song (CE 960-1279), it had already—centuries before—become a well-established and well-articulated funerial convention. Resulting from the biographical material they exclusively feature, epitaphs are, by definition, identifiers of the deceased. As they became increasingly more commonplace during the Period of Division (CE 220-589), protocols became prescribed for the solicitation as well as composition of epitaphs, whereby they thus became collectively a distinctively recognizable literary genre. Yet, by Song times, epitaphs had arguably become regarded as being considerably more than mere testaments to the lived life experience of a given gravesite occupant. An informed consideration of epitaphs in the Song reveals them to function additionally as talismanic totems, intended to ward off all forms of inconstancy.

About Don Wyatt

Don Wyatt specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections of identity and violence and the nexuses of ethnicity and slavery. He is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China, the past editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, and the former concurrent president of its Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies. Among his most recent publications are chapter essays in the medieval volumes of both the Cambridge World History of Violence and the Cambridge World History of Slavery as well as in Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900.

Remembering Lady Cui (1007–1062): Writing the Memory of an Elite Woman in Northern Song China

This paper examines the commemoration of Lady Cui 崔氏 (1007-1062), wife of the Northern Song (960-1127) statesman Han Qi 韓琦 (1008-1075), through three funerary biographies. These include a lu 録 account written by Han Qi, a record of conduct (xingzhuang 行狀) by Lady Cui’s brother, Cui Gongru 崔公孺 (1014-1071), and an entombed epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘) composed by Han Qi’s friend and associate, Chen Jian 陳薦 (1016-1084). Written in close succession between Lady Cui’s death on 1062/9/2 and her burial on 1062/11/29, these three accounts portray her as a female exemplar, praising her steadfast support as Han Qi’s most capable “inner” helper, her filial devotion to her mother-in-law and parents, and her exceptional household management skills. Despite their shared emphasis on Lady Cui’s outstanding conduct and accomplishments, the three biographies diverge in significant ways. Taken together, these three biographies reveal not only the complexity of funerary biographical writing in middle-period China but also how individual, familial, and rhetorical considerations shaped Lady Cui’s memory and identity.

About Cong Ellen Zhang

Cong Ellen Zhang’s research centers around Imperial China, the Song dynasty (960-1279), political history and culture, culture and society, women and family, biji and biographical writing. Publications include “Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives,” and “Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China (960-1127): Family, State, and Native Place.”

Image credit: Epitaph cover of Lady Cui of Anguo of the Song 

Beverly Bossler is a historian of China of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties (from the 9th to 14th centuries). Her work focuses on family, kinship, and gender relations, and how personal relationships impact social, political, and intellectual life. Her most recent monograph, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000-14000, investigates the transformation of gender relations between the Tang and the Yuan.

Bonnie Cheng teaches courses in Chinese and Japanese art that span ancient to modern eras. Her topical classes include courses on imperial Chinese painting and ceramics, ukiyo-e, and modern Chinese Art. Thematic courses explore Monuments, Death and Dying in East Asia, and perspectives on Cultural Property. Her research explores innovative modes of production, materiality, artistic exchange, and the construction of political and social identities in early medieval Chinese funerary art. She focuses primarily on the intersection of competing media and motivations of the living and dead within the space of the tomb.

Jason Protass is a historian of Chinese Buddhism. He specializes in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, the period of the Northern Song (960-1127) and its legacies. His most recent publication is the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and their Environments (2025). His first book, The Poetry Demon: Song-dynasty Monks on Verse and the Way (2021), examines Buddhist monks' understanding of Chinese poetry and its relationships to the Buddhist path. Protass has published additional essays and chapters on Buddhist monks' poetry, including "The Flavors of Monks' Poetry: On a Witty Disparagement and Its Influences" (2021), "Buddhist Fund-Raising Poems and Other Lost Verses" (2023), and "The Plum-Blossom Monk: Jichan" (2025).

Brian Vivier directs the Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections at the Penn Libraries, leading the Center and its librarians in building wide-ranging and inclusive collections related to Africa, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. Trained in Chinese history, Brian is an adjunct associate professor of Chinese studies, teaching graduate seminars and serving on dissertation committees. His research focuses on the economic and social history of Middle Period China and on China’s frontiers from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.