INTRODUCTION. A GRAVE FOR TEETH, A GRAVE FOR BOOKS

Abstract

When Yao Wenyu lost a tooth sometime around dingmao (1867), her family kept it. At that moment, this wife, mother, and grandmother in a prominent scholar’s family was just beginning years of relative prosperity and stability after frequent moves and separations from her husband in the first decades of their marriage (see figure I.1). Some of their wanderings had been spurred by the vicissitudes of his career, some by the Taiping civil war that wracked China in the 1850s and early 1860s. In renwu (1882), three years after her death, her widower Yu Yue (1821–1907) buried her tooth together with one he had lost the previous year, inscribing the tiny grave with a poem. To his astonishment, a Japanese admirer heard the story and sent him a poem commenting on the tooth grave. When Yu later summed up his life in a series of quatrains, one poem opens with a description of the tooth grave, and closes with amazement that news of it should travel so far.1 Completing the circle, the autobiographical quatrain series containing this exchange was itself reprinted in Japan a year after it was published in China.2 The actual tooth grave near where Yu Yue lectured on the Confucian classics by West Lake in Hangzhou has long since vanished, but the poem survives, circulating with Yu’s collected works.3 Because of Yu Yue’s prolific writing and its wide distribution, a whimsical yet mournful act, creating the tooth grave as a miniature of the shared grave where the widower will one day lie beside his wife, has an international audience. In the fifteen years between Yao Wenyu’s loss of the tooth and Yu’s monument, he rose from a dismissed official, albeit with influential friends, to the director of one of the country’s most prominent Confucian academies and one