Between Epigraphy and History: New Approaches to Premodern Chinese Life Writing

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Grouped or categorized biographies (liezhuan) in the Chinese Standard Histories remain vital resources for historians of eastern Eurasia. These fascinating texts sit uneasily alongside epigraphical life-writing, however, even when these sources contributed directly to the liezhuan themselves. Although older historical approaches reconciled differences between various accounts of individual lives to reconstruct historical events, other scholarship has regarded the biographies as mere stereotyped exemplars. It is clear that such texts need to be considered as both and neither of these, and historians need a new set of tools to appreciate the rhetorical and generic nuance of both epigraphical and formal historical writing at every stage of composition and compilation. Building on the previous panel’s interrogation of the form, function and production of epitaphs, this panel examines their employment alongside other texts in the production of Standard History biographies. Timothy Davis exposes conflicting rhetoric in the Wei shu biography and muzhiming for the 5th century Northern Wei prince Yuan Zhen. Anna Shields exposes techniques employed to correct and rework literati biographies between the Old and New Tang Histories, and the compilation teams’ complex employment of multiple sets of funerary and literary material to this end. Michael Hoeckelmann traces the expression of divergent perspectives on eunuch marriage and adoptions between Tang histories and both transmitted and excavated inscriptions. Geoff Humble reveals the nature and impact of key narrative techniques employed at multiple stages in the production of the extant lives of Yelü Chucai.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Geoffrey Humble, University of Birmingham

Chair

• Sarah Schneewind, University of California, San Diego

Individual Presentations

• The Earliest Northern Wei Muzhiming in Context - Timothy Davis, Brigham Young University

• From Commemoration to Biography: The Influence of Commemorative Texts for Tang Literati on Biographies in the New and Old Tang Histories - Anna M. Shields, Princeton University

• Eunuch Marriages and Adoptions: Evidence from the Tang - Michael Hoeckelmann, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Constructing Ideals, Defining an Era: Event, Process and Rhetoric in the Lives of Yelü Chucai (1189-1243) - Geoffrey Humble, University of Birmingham

Discussant

• Sarah Schneewind, University of California, San Diego