The Politics of Mourning in Early China

reevaluates the longstanding assumptions about early imperial political

culture. According to most explanations, fi lial piety served as the

linchpin of the social and political order, as all political relations were

a seamless extension of the relationship between father and son—a

relationship that was hierarchical, paternalistic, and personal. Offering a

new perspective on the mourning practices and funerary monuments

of the Han dynasty, Miranda Brown asks whether the early imperial

elite did in fact imagine political participation solely along the lines of

the father-son relationship or whether there were alternative visions

of political association. The early imperial elite held remarkably

varied and contradictory beliefs about political life, and they had

multiple templates and changing scripts for political action. This book

documents and explains such diversity and variation and shows that the

Han dynasty practice of mourning expressed many visions of political

life, visions that left lasting legacies.

“Brown’s book is a careful study that masterfully engages its sources:

commemorative inscriptions of the Eastern Han dynasty. Not content

to accept previous generalizations about these sources, she rereads

them with a critical eye and shows that Eastern Han men had a much

broader conception of political association and service than previously

thought. By looking closely at Eastern Han epitaphs and not being

beholden to any previous assumptions about them, Brown successfully

throws doubt on many conventional explanations of these documents.”

— Keith Nathaniel Knapp, author of Selfl ess Offspring: Filial Children

and Social Order in Medieval China