Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China.
Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors' longing for the dead.
These epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children--people who are not well documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories and local gazetteers.
This antho.
University Of Washington Press Chinese funerary biographies: an anthology of remembered lives, paperback/patricia buckley ebrey
