In eleventh century China, dazzling theatrical spectacles were performed not only for the living, but also the dead. Beyond urbanizing theaters and temple stages, developments in theatrical performances also materialized as conspicuous representations and entered underground tomb spaces. The occupants of these tombs exclusively belong to a kind of local elites who were affluent yet socially underprivileged, such as merchants or well-off farmers. Theater of the Dead is the first in-depth study of a rich corpus of funerary art representing theatrical performances that reveal their attitudes towa ... More

In eleventh century China, dazzling theatrical spectacles were performed not only for the living, but also the dead. Beyond urbanizing theaters and temple stages, developments in theatrical performances also materialized as conspicuous representations and entered underground tomb spaces. The occupants of these tombs exclusively belong to a kind of local elites who were affluent yet socially underprivileged, such as merchants or well-off farmers. Theater of the Dead is the first in-depth study of a rich corpus of funerary art representing theatrical performances that reveal their attitudes toward death and the netherworld. An overarching sense of intense theatricality revealed through close analyses of selected cases conveys a densely socialized vision of the netherworld. Referred to as “a social turn,” this phenomenon not only registers the visual and cultural tastes of the underrepresented group of people whose lives and deaths are largely unrecorded in historical texts, but also points to their growing interest in conceptualizing the sphere of the dead within the existing social framework. The book shows these particular elites’ position in the changing boundaries among social groups, and also provides a new frame for understanding the increasingly flexible boundaries between disparate rituals and religious practices in middle-period China.