Bronze and Stone by Yunchiahn C. Sena;

Author:Yunchiahn C. Sena;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295744582
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Liu Stele’s puzzling features were results of archaistic appropriation. During the Eastern Han period (25–220 CE), when funerary parks (lingyuan) for aristocrats and court officials were built with monumental stone structures, the significance of an epitaphic stele (mubei) was marked by its imposing size and central location in the park. Although no such structures from the Eastern Han have survived intact, scholars have reconstructed a general layout of a funerary park from surviving fragments and also based on records in the Commentary on the Waterways Classic (Shuijing zhu), an ancient text on geography dated to the sixth century.63 As shown in the reconstruction (figure 3.17), the first part of a typical Eastern Han funerary park, which marked the entrance and differentiated the spiritual ground from the space outside, is a pair of que-gates.64 Immediately following the gates into the park was the spirit road (shendao), which marked the park’s central axis.65

The spirit road, often lined with stone figures and animals on both sides, guided the visitors to the third part of the funerary park, which was where commemorative rituals for the deceased would take place. One or more epitaphic stelae stood on the central axis along the spirit road in front of a stone offering shrine dedicated to the deceased. Eventually, at the end of the spirit road was the tomb, an underground burial structure covered by an earthen mound.66 As the visitors traveled down the spirit road from the que-gates, the stele, with its central location and imposing height, would oblige them to pause in their procession. The visitors would acknowledge the life and deeds of the deceased by reading through the stele inscription, which consisted of the name and official title of the deceased, often in large seal-script characters on top of the stele, and the details of the deceased’s life inscribed in the main text, often in clerical script. A good example of an Eastern Han epitaphic stele in its original mortuary context is the Gao Yi Stele, located near Pengshan, which was the native place of the Yu family and also where Yu’s tomb was found.

According to the Annotations of the Clerical Script (Li shi), an antiquarian text by Hong Kuo (1117–1184) who recorded nearly two hundred ancient stelae from the Han-Wei period (the second century BCE to third century CE), the Gao Yi Stele was still well preserved during the second half of the twelfth century when Hong compiled his book (figure 3.18).67 Although it is difficult to know whether Yu Gongzhu had actually visited Gao Yi’s burial site in the neighboring town, we can safely assume that knowledge about Eastern Han burial sites and epitaphic stelae was readily available to him through antiquarian studies and actual remains in the local region. This assumption is supported by an interesting detail on the rendering of the corona motif on top of the Liu Stele. On the one hand, the stiffness of the grooves reveals Yu’s knowledge about the rendition of the same motif in Hong’s

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