162 Notes to Pages 33–75
- One other Han tomb deserves mention for the insight it sheds on Han life: the tomb of
the Han imperial prince Liu Sheng, one of the brothers of Han Wudi. Liu Sheng and
his wife, Princess Dou Wan, were buried in suits made of more than 2,000 small square
or rectangular plaques of jade, each with four holes drilled in the corners so they could
be tied together with fi ne wire made of gold. Small carved jade plugs were used to
block all the apertures of their bodies. Whether these suits were intended to preserve
the bodies of the prince and princess or to ward off evil spirits in the netherworld,
these tombs confi rmed what earlier texts had claimed, that members of the Han royal
family were often buried in such jade funeral suits. The tomb was also fi lled with tables
and utensils for eating and drinking, including beautiful bronze vessels for ancestral
sacrifi ces, bronze lamps, and incense burners, all suggesting that the dead souls in the
tomb were expected to carry on their daily activities just as the living. - Elfriede R. Knauer has recently amassed a great deal of evidence to support her
thesis that this folk deity, Queen Mother of the West, was in fact inspired by the
Greco-Roman deity Kybele or Cybele. Knauer’s richly documented study provides
striking evidence that Chinese civilization was never as isolated and self-contained
as most modern scholars have long assumed. See Elfriede R. Knauer, “The Queen
Mother of the West: A Study of the Infl uence of Western Prototypes on the
Iconography of the Taoist Deity,” in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World,
ed. Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 62–115. - Ban Zhao, “Precepts for My Daughter,” in Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red
Brush: Writing Women in Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Asia Center, 2004), 37.
CHAPTER 3- John E. Wills, Jr., Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 101. - The commercial development of Jiankang is well described in Shufen Liu, “Jiankang
and the Commercial Empire of the Southern Dynasties,” in Culture and Power in the
Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, ed. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and
Patricia Ebrey (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 35–52. - Quoted in Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans.
H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 241. - Ibid., 238.
- Ibid., 239.
- About a century after the Seven Sages, another poet, Tao Qian, achieved
unparalleled fame for resigning his government post to tend his fi elds and write
poetry celebrating the beauties of nature and the joys of private life.
CHAPTER 4- Mark Edward Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), see esp. 163–78. - S. A. M. Adshead, T’ang China: The Rise of the East in World History (Basingstoke,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 85–86. - Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1963), 15; Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire, 169–70.
CHAPTER 5- “Jian zi mulanhua,” trans. Eugene Eoyang, in Women Writers of Traditional China,
ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1999), 93.