Ancestors, Spouses, and Descendants: The Transformation of Epitaph Writing in Song Luzhou

Abstract

In contrast to the abundant scholarship on local society and local elites in South China during the Song dynasty, corresponding studies on North China have been largely unavailable because of the shortage of relevant sources. In recent years, 101 newly-discovered epitaphs from Luzhou 潞州, a peripheral region in north China, have begun to change our understanding of the composition and strategies of Song local elites, which has been based on models from South China. Ranging over 162 years, from 960 to 1122, sixty-one of these epitaphs (60%) were written during the first forty-six years of the Northern Song (960–1006), seventy-eight (77%) were written within the dynasty’s first hundred years (960–1059), and twenty-three additional epitaphs (23%) were written after 1069.2 While they vary in length, roughly between 200 to 1,000 characters, most