Western Han Funerary Relocation Documents and the Making of the Dead in Early Imperial China

Abstract

In this first comprehensive study of what I call funerary “relocating-to-the-Underworld documents” (abbr. relocation documents), I analyze the ten known cases that have been excavated between 1973 and 2016 in southern China. Through the analytical lens of the making of the dead, I argue that this particular type of textual object found exclusively in Western Han tombs in the second and first centuries b.c.e. can be viewed as a material manifestation of the strategic negotiation between an omnipresent imperial state and its agentive imperial subjects at the intersection of bureaucratic authority and the creation of a desirable afterlife for the dead of the empire. There are three main objectives of the present study. First, I propose to designate these entombed objects as “relocation documents” (yi dixia shu 移地下書), highlighting their primary ritual function as to present and/or produce a desirable afterlife status for the deceased when they relocate to the Underworld. I argue that a typical funerary relocation document has two essential components: a “notification letter” (yiwen 移文) and “itemized details” (ximu 細目). In the current scholarship, the former has been called gaodice 告地策 (informing-the-Underworld document), and the latter qiance 遣策 (tomb inventory). They are conventionally considered to be two distinct and separate genres of text. Although qiance have been found alone in tombs, in the case of funerary relocation documents, I argue that they are integral to the complete package to fulfill its ritual function and that these two components should be considered together as a single document. Second, instead of characterizing these relocation documents collectively as a homogenous genre of text and identifying them as imperfect imitations of Han official documents, I emphasize their material nature as funerary objects and contextualize them as part of the funerary assemblage for burial. I analyze their structural composition—both physical and textual—and situate them in the context of their production and entombment in relation to the deceased as well as the broader social-historical conditions shared by the local community of which the dead was a part. The detailed case studies of the relocation documents, on the one hand, expectedly confirm a wide and deep penetration of the state power into the fabric of the Han society, in life and in death, through the institutions of household registration and the 20-rank system; on the other hand, they also reveal the much less understood side of imperial control, that the lesser elite and the ordinary subjects of the empire were not passive receivers. Rather, they were informed about and understood the authority embedded in state institutions and bureaucratic procedures to the extent that they knew how to “work the system” to their own advantage with regard to the afterlife. Third, although each relocation document exhibits notable individual, even idiosyncratic, characteristics, the fact that nine of the ten known specimens were found in close geographical and temporal proximity to one another in the greater Han Jiangling 江陵 region in present-day Hubei strongly indicates that Jiangling was the center for the practice of interring funerary relocation document in burials. Evidence also suggests that there was likely a regional funerary tradition and economy enabling and supporting their production and circulation among other funerary objects such as tomb figurines. A fully annotated translation of the eight published cases of funerary relocation documents is included in the Appendix.