Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art 2012 'My Tomb Will Be Opened in Eight Hundred Years’: A New Way of Seeing the Afterlife in Six Dynasties China Jie Shi Bryn Mawr College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Custom Citation Shi, Jie. 2012. "‘My Tomb Will Be Opened in Eight Hundred Years’: A New Way of Seeing the Afterlife in Six Dynasties China." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 72.2: 117–157. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/82 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Shi, Jie. 2012. "‘My Tomb Will Be Opened in Eight Hundred Years’: Another View of the Afterlife in the Six Dynasties China." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 72.2: 117–157. http://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2012.0027 “My Tomb Will Be Opened in Eight Hundred Years”: A New Way of Seeing the Afterlife in Six Dynasties China Jie Shi, University of Chicago Abstract: Jie Shi analyzes the sixth-century epitaph of Prince Shedi Huiluo as both a funerary text and a burial object in order to show that the means of achieving posthumous immortality radically changed during the Six Dynasties. Whereas the Han-dynasty vision of an immortal afterlife counted mainly on the imperishability of the tomb itself, Shedi’s epitaph predicted that the tomb housing it would eventually be ruined.