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

Abstract

Ancestors, Spouses, and Descendants:The Transformation of Epitaph Writing in Song Luzhou Man Xu Introduction 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,1 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 [End Page 119] of them are elaborate and include approximately 500 characters.3 Unlike the more developed regions of South China where scholar-official (shi 士) elites were prevalent and active, Luzhou's economic disadvantages produced a local upper class comprised of low-end elites. Furthermore, in contrast to contemporary epitaphs from South China, Luzhou epitaphs, until the mid-eleventh century, were considerably more formulaic in presenting the information of ancestors and spouses and placed great emphasis on descendants. Luzhou was located at the halfway point between Luoyang and Taiyuan, and was closely linked to Chang'an and Luoyang via water and land transportation, so that it was connected with the Tang Empire's economic core and its elites were deeply embedded in an empire-wide aristocratic culture. The turmoil and decline that Luzhou experienced during the Tang-Song transition were not uncommon among northern prefectures, and were common to other prefectures in the northern periphery of the North China macroregion. Luzhou experienced systemic economic and demographic decline during the first 150 years of the Tang and maintained equilibrium for approximately 800 years before rapid development finally occurred in the mid-sixteenth century.4 Accompanying the collapse of the Tang Empire in the ninth century, the metropolitan aristocracy based in the Chang'an-Luoyang capital corridor diminished.5 Yet, in spite of the continuous warfare of the late Tang and the Five Dynasties, Luzhou elites demonstrated astonishing consistency—whether measured in terms of composition, demography, socio-economic strategies, and cultural orientations—from the mid-eighth through mid-eleventh centuries. Although the peace brought by the founding of the Song helped stabilize local population levels in Luzhou, its elites never regained their past social, [End Page 120] cultural, and political achievements. A few local military men established themselves as a "founding elite" of the new empire and transformed themselves into national elites, but severed their connections with the local community when they relocated to the capital region.6 During the Northern Song, Luzhou as a whole lagged behind other prefectures across the empire in producing members of the scholar-official class. Even though it was only about 200 miles away from the capital, Kaifeng, Luzhou declined into a typical underdeveloped prefecture in North China during the Northern Song.7 Since its downward economic and demographic trajectory made its elites less powerful and prominent at the empire's political center, Luzhou gave rise to a low-end elite culture. Not only were Luzhou elites less cosmopolitan, educated, and well-networked than the Song national elite, they also preserved an old Tang aristocratic heritage that Song historians have rarely seen in South China.8 The standard scholar-official characteristics that historians have attributed to local elites of the Song, do not apply to Luzhou, a peripheral prefecture that lacked economic and cultural resources. Its elites did not participate in the broader cultural dynamics of Northern Song elites, so that a man's—and his family's—elite status in Luzhou society continued to be substantially dependent upon maintaining wealth. While the Tang-Song dynastic transition had a greater impact on national elites than it did on Luzhou elites, the New Policies (xinfa 新法) largely modified their composition and orientation. In the second half of the eleventh century, the court...