UC Santa Barbara

The deceased of Ancient China were sometimes accompanied into the afterlife with a list of various types of funerary and offering goods. However, the subject remains less developed than those in other ancient civilizations due to its intricate nature. Funerary inventories of ancient China also stand out for their constantly changing ritual nature over a long period of history, which is most abundantly evident in burials from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE).This dissertation presents the physical, textual, material, and ritual development of funerary inventories of ancient China from the Warring States period to the Wei-Jin period. It examines the changes in the items on the inventories under the framework of “rites of passage” and illustrates how Chinese in different times adopted funerary inventories as a tool to negotiate the social identities of the living during the funeral and reestablish the social identities of the dead in the netherworld. This dissertation also argues against the stereotypical understanding in current scholarship, which sees the funerary inventory as a static and unifunctional text. It analyzes the physical form, textual features, and functions of funerary inventories to comprehensively study the evolution of mortuary inventories and related funerary practices in ancient China. It has been argued that itemized burial goods, as well as their archaeological and ritual contexts, indicate a change in the focus of funerary inventories from the living to the deceased. From the Warring States period to the early Western Han dynasty, funerary inventories gradually shifted to a focus on creating an underground afterlife for the deceased. And the evolution of funerary inventories in the Han-Jin period is arguably driven by changing understanding of death and the afterlife which led to a variety of ways to separate the dead from the living.