Local Elites in Transition: Epitaphs Excavated in Luzhou from the 7th to 12th Centuries

This article adopts a broad trans-dynastic approach to frame a comparative study of the Chinese sociopolitical elites in a changing time of six centuries, spanning from the Sui era to the end of the Northern Song period. The transformation of elites at the local level remains largely unexplored in the Tang-Song Transition. This article contextualizes its study in the prefecture of Luzhou in southeast Shanxi. The prosperity, chaos, and decline that Luzhou experienced in the Tang, Five-Dynasties, and Song periods were not uncommon among northern prefectures. It interestingly gave rise to a Song low-end elite culture preserving considerable Tang aristocratic heritages that historians have not discovered in the study of South China.

Epitaphs rose as a prominent literary genre in the middle period, prospered throughout the late imperial time, and have been widely studied since the late twentieth century accompanying the extensive excavations of tomb stones. Historians draw upon them to rediscover Chinese local society and reconstruct the life experiences of local elites without written records. The article examines several hundred newly collected, highly concentrated excavated epitaphs in Luzhou from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. They provide us unique first-hand sources to study elites without textual records about their lives and burial experiences in one locale in North China. They not only reveal the gradual transformation of dominant social values and expectations over the long six centuries of medieval Chinese history, but also surprisingly challenge the knowledge of Tang-Song epitaph writings that we have taken for granted for decades.